Koro Island Narrative

Koro Island is approximately 30 nmi south of Savusavu, making it a very manageable day trip. Since our ultimate goal was to depart Fiji and head north, it may seem strange that we would start out by going due south, but there is, in fact, some method to our madness, and as usual it has something to do with weather. Basically, in order to go north we would have to first get around the big island of Vanua Levu, which meant a long stretch going due east toward the island of Taveuni. Since the trade winds blow anywhere from SE to E, as you can imagine, trying to go due East presents a bit of a challenge. So, we basically used the island of Koro as an intermediate waypoint on a long tack. The strategy was to leave Savusavu and go south to Koro when the trades are blowing more from the east, and then after a couple days when the switch back to the SE we could easily head NE from Koro to Taveuni. This mostly played out according to our strategy, only we had to stay at Koro six days rather than just a couple.

The sail itself from Savusavu to Koro turned out to be a very pleasant day sail with light winds on the beam. We went to Dere Bay on the northwest side of the island, which is the usual place cruisers go for protection from the trade winds. When we arrived there were no other boats there, but that wasn’t much of a surprise given how late it was getting in the season. We picked up one of the mooring balls and then went straight away to shore. Dere Bay has a ridiculously long pier extending out over the shallow coral so there’s a suitable place to tie up small boats. We made our way up to a resort, which had a nice deck and bar/restaurant area, but it was totally deserted. There was a woman in a small office, so we talked to her about paying for the mooring and which way we should go to the nearest village to do sevusevu.

So, we ended up walking about 30 min partly along a trail and partly along a dirt road down to the nearest village to the south, which is called Nabasobi. This was our final sevusevu in Fiji, and it turned out to be lucky number 13. Each one is different depending on what’s going on in the village at the moment and on the personality of each chief. Lucky number 13 was the first time the chief did the sevusevu wearing shorts (not a sulu) and it was also the first time the chief sat around chatting with us afterwards. We ended up hanging out for about an hour. This one was also the first time we were served cold drinks (Fanta orange, Brenden’s favorite), and on a hot day, it was like magic.

Everyone said there were lobsters at Koro, so I had high hopes that we would get some of these, as Carolina used to call them, butter delivery vehicles. Tim tried his best and went diving at night while Brenden drove the dinghy for him, but unfortunately he only found very small ones. Not wanting to decimate the lobster population of Koro, of course he left those alone.

At the south side of the anchorage there was a sand spit that dried at low tide. I spotted just the tip of it at high tide when I was out for a morning paddle, so we decided to turn it into an afternoon family outing. We threw a beach umbrella, some drinks, and the bocce ball set into the dinghy and headed over at low tide and played some serious games of bocce. Well, as serious as anything gets with Brenden around.

Our days at Koro were memorable for a few reasons, but for Brenden, it all has to do with his spearfishing “firsts.” He had two milestones, and the first was being able to load his speargun without help. The rubber bands that propel the spear forward when fired are quite strong, and until now Brenden had to pass his gun off to Tim after he took a shot in order to reload it. However, I guess all of those pullups he’s been doing have paid off. But the real memorable milestone is that he speared his first dogtooth tuna! The dogtooth is a prize among spearfishermen, so Brenden was so happy, absolutely beaming. He wanted to be sure to tell Jack (Iguana) and Hans (Nautilus) as soon as we had internet again. We were all quite happy with his accomplishment, actually, because dogtooth is very tasty sashimi indeed.