We intentionally arrived on a Monday morning, because we’d been told that you can rack up quite a bill with the officials because of overtime fees if you arrive on a weekend. In some countries, you can’t even clear in on the weekend. You’re just supposed to stay on your boat with your Q flag flying until Monday morning (with varying degrees of the level of enforcement of this rule). On the other hand, New Zealand allowed clearance 7 days/week without any fees at all never mind fees for overtime. Tonga will clear you in on the weekend if you want, but you have to pay overtime fees, or you can just stay on your boat until Monday, you choose. Apparently in Fiji, there is no choice. If you arrive on the weekend, you still must clear in, and you must pay overtime fees. So, we avoided that headache by simply arriving on a Monday. Luckily, there was no surprise public holiday.
Arriving to Fiji from New Zealand, clearing in at Savusavu is not the automatic choice. A lot of boats go first to Suva since it is fewer miles and there are more services there. However, we chose Savusavu, because it is the furthest east. This is important if you want to go to The Lau group, which is east of all ports of clearance, so the further east you can be the better your chance for getting a break in the trade winds for a weather window to Lau. Additionally, we had heard from other cruisers that Savusavu is just nicer and less industrial than Suva, so since we didn’t need anything from Suva, we decided to clear in to Savusavu. It didn’t hurt that all of our friends were going there too.
There is no Port Captain in Savusavu, so in order to clear in you are supposed to radio one of the Marinas to announce your arrival and get instructions. Our friends had told us to call The Copra Shed Marina, because they have a clearance dock, but we later learned that Waitui Marina can also organize your clearance for you, and they will shuttle the officials out to your boat. Also, as we learned much later, Waitui has a much friendlier staff. But anyway, we called Copra Shed and since there was already a boat at the clearance dock, they instructed us to pick up a mooring and wait. When it was our turn we moved Exodus to the dock, but it was sort of a comical situation, and luckily our friends on Et Voila had given us a heads up. It turns out the clearance dock is a very short dock, probably only 2/3 of the length of Exodus, and it was a bit rickety as well. We put our stern in line with one end of the dock and let the bow stick out, that way boarding would still be possible. In hindsight, maybe having officials shuttled out to our boat wouldn’t be so bad. Especially since when we were back in Savusavu at the end of the season they weren’t making boats wait on a mooring for their turn (since the moorings were full) they were just having them raft up at the clearance dock. One day, they were four boats deep.
Before I go on to tell you about what happened when the officials arrived, I need to provide a little background. Fiji is only the second country we’ve visited where you have to provide advanced notice of your arrival, the first being New Zealand. And it’s obvious that Fiji has copied their processes from New Zealand, because the forms they use are all identical. So, like New Zealand, Fiji requires you to email an advance notice form at least 48 hours prior to arrival. Since we wouldn’t have any sort of internet access along the way, I emailed the form the morning we left New Zealand. I emailed it first thing in the morning, but by the time we were tossing off the dock lines at mid day, we still hadn’t received any sort of confirmation email back. They don’t typically send back a confirmation, but I had been told by other cruisers that if you specifically ask for them to respond back then sometimes they will. So, all the way from New Zealand to Fiji I fretted about whether or not our paperwork had been received. I even tried to have my Dad and my friend Colin access my yahoo email while we were offshore to see if a confirmation email ever arrived, but I had set up an inpenetrable security defense on my yahoo account so they weren’t able to access from a new computer. I asked about it on the SSB net, and some people had gotten an email back but most didn’t, and everyone said not to worry about. So, I tried to stop worrying about it, but there was always a little nagging thought there.
So, now we are on the dock in Savusavu, and the first officials to visit us were from Health and Biosecurity. They were two very jovial and friendly men, and for a few minutes I didn’t think about the paperwork. Unlike New Zealand, they didn’t take any of our meat, vegetables (if we had them), or anything else even though their process said they would. They just made us promise we wouldn’t take any food we brought with us off the boat. Easy enough.
Then the customs and immigration officials arrived. The lead customs official was a small, slender woman with a stern face, and the first thing she said to us was, “We have not received any paperwork from you. Do you not understand the regulations here in Fiji?” Unbelievable! Seriously, at first I didn’t believe it. My first thought was that somehow, some way, Tim had gotten to them and they were playing a practical joke on me. But no, that wasn’t the case after all. They really didn’t recieve our paperwork. So, she said that since we didn’t send advanced notice they would have to search our boat. This made me a little nervous since we had so much alcohol on board, way more than the official import rules allow, but I calmly just said, “OK, no problem, go ahead.” The “search” turned out to be a complete joke. Clearly they were just checking the box in response to this situation that neither one of us wanted to be in. All they did was look around the salon, open the silverware drawer, and poke their heads down into each hull. Needless to say, we checked out OK. Also, I was able to show them the emails I had sent while we were offshore updating them on our ETA as we progressed from New Zealand to Minerva Reef to Fiji. This proof that we had in fact been following the rules and somehow technology was to blame went a long way, I think, to cause the laid back attitude regarding the search.
Once we were all cleared in, Tim went to ask the marina, The Copra Shed Marina, about a mooring ball for a few days. He came back and said that they have a space on the dock, and he seemed eager to take it. For some reason, I couldn’t stand the idea of being at the dock, it just seemed more appropriate to be out on a mooring or even at anchor for our much deserved safe arrival drinks. So, I had to go talk to the marina again and after they originally told us they only had the dock space they finally relented and gave us a mooring. I think they were just trying to sell the dock space to us because it’s more expensive.
The administrative process of arriving in Fiji wasn’t quite complete, even though at that point we were allowed to take the Q flag down. We still had to do the following:
1) Get our island cruising permit. You get this from the Itaukei Affairs Board, and I’ve read that you can go to the office yourself in Savusavu to get this, but most people just pay the marina 10 Fijian dollars to take care of it. So, that’s what we did too. This document is written in Fijian, and it is the official letter to the chiefs and village headmen of the islands so that they know you have permission to cruise there. We were told that you should always bring this document ashore with you the first time in case they ask for it, but no one ever asked us for it.
2) Get our coastal clearance. This is a document you get from Customs that is basically your permission to leave your port of entry, in our case Savusavu. On our third day there I went to customs to take care of this, and they didn’t make me wait at the window line but rather brought me to the back office for this. The man who helped me was young, and he gave me a chair to sit in while he finished the process of typing up the email that he was in the middle of. No problem, at least the office was air conditioned. He got the permit all typed up, printed it out, and then realized he made a mistake and didn’t update one of the fields. So, he fixed it and printed it out again. Then, when I thought we were just about done, he asked to see my receipts for paying my health and biosecurity fees. Of course, I hadn’t done that yet, as those were going to be my next to errands of the day. You could tell he wasn’t quite sure what to do, so he just made me promise that I would pay the fees since he wasn’t supposed to give me the coastal clearance until those fees are paid. Of course, I crossed my heart and hoped to die.
3) Pay the Health and Biosecurity fees. If you arrive with Fijian dollars, you can pay these fees on the spot when the officials are on your boat, but if you don’t, they write you an invoice and it’s your responsibility to go to the offices at your convenience to get them paid. As mentioned above, the check on this is supposed to be showing your receipts to get your coastal clearance, but I managed to unintentionally circumvent that process. But of course, I paid the fees anyway. Both offices are on the other side of town from where the customs office is, and Alex joined me for the walk around town. Everyone was friendly and getting the fees paid was easy. It was $87.70 Fijian for Biosecurity and $172 for Ministry of Health.
Gresham Family Exodus 