Warning: Rant Ahead!
June 12, 2013
We’d only been in Savusavu a couple of days when we attended Curly’s seminar on cruising Fiji, held weekly at the Surf ‘n Turf restaurant. It’s a 3- to 4-hour talk that includes Curly’s waypoints, maps, and a cheeseburger lunch for one low price. I’ve told this story in our Fiji Information pages, but I’ll recap it here.
Curly is a nice guy with some good info, and we do agree with some of the things he says. We also appreciate his maps and waypoints. But frankly, some of his advice is, in retrospect, way out of date. Below is a summery of things we were told at the seminar, with our thoughts in parenthesis below each one.
–Dangerous reefs and winds necessitate that you only exit and enter bays when winds are very light, the sky clear, the sun overhead or, when entering a new bay, behind you.
(Really? Consistently clear skies in the rainy tropics? And how do you manage sun overhead for both your exits and entries when many trips take the better part of a day?)
–After you arrive at a new anchorage, you must to make a pilgrimage ashore, locate the village, then hunt for a representative to take you to the chief where you can present kava and do the sevusevu ceremony. Someone asked, “What if you’re only making a brief stop for the night?” Curly replied that if and when your boat ends up on the reef at the pass (is this the norm?), the villagers will not help you because without doing the ceremony, you’re dead to them. He said it’s best seek out villages and do a sevusevu everywhere you go.
(Sounds like the Amazing Race–after completing the challenge we should get a yellow clue to the next destination. We don’t believe that a Fijian would ever deny help to anyone in need, under any circumstances.)
–Be prepared that the chief might not like you, in which case you’ll have to leave.
(Intimidating or what? We can’t imagine a Fijian, the kindest people in the world, not welcoming a visitor!)
–Be prepared to fend off locals hitting you up for anchoring fees. Curly recommends you find a stationery store, laminate the copy of your cruising permit, get it translated into English and have that laminated, too. Bring these ashore with you at all times. When you need to argue, you take out your laminated permit (which entitles you anchor for no fee in most of Fiji), find the specific rule in English and point it out to the local who’s trying to shake you down. Two people asked Curly to be more specific about where this disagreement might occur, but he never would say.
(Oh great, go find the village and argue about any asked-for fee, yet not offend the chief?)
–The having to fend off fee-seekers really ramps up on the west side (the mainstream tourist side) of Fiji, where various people will try to extract fees from you for the same anchorage and kids try to sell you stuff.
(I don’t know where Curly gets this: there are few villages to contend with on the west side and resort owners ask for fees only in exchange for Mai Tais.)
–Don’t pay for anything: trade only! This means you have to know the value of anything you might be trading for (fruit, fish, coconuts, etc.) and have baggies of that same value of flour, sugar, tea, etc. “Ladies, it’s up to you,” he likes to say.
(As though the uterus is a magic grocery price calculator.)
–Speaking of ladies, we are bottom of the barrel in kava ceremonies as women’s main job is serving the men, heh heh heh.
(I didn’t find this at all amusing. So why would I want to go someplace where I’m considered a second class citizen because of my gender? Oh wait, I guess I already live on planet Earth.)
–You generally need to carry 12 bundles of fresh kava to cover all your sevusevus, replenishing as you go to keep it fresh.
(We’re not supposed to set a precedence of paying for things yet we’re supposed to buy over a hundred dollars worth of kava? Oh yea, more if you “keep it fresh!”)
Frankly cruising Fiji sounded like a nightmare, and at one point in the talk, Rich became so irritated that he got up and left. After it was over, I am not exaggerating when I say we considered leaving Fiji. But the story has a happy ending: we went to the bar and met up with friends who’d also suffered through the talk, with whom we could vent, and drink alcohol, with which we could feel better.
More people started to drift in, including a couple that we didn’t know well, Helena and Kari from Merilelu. We’d become aware of them on the pacific crossing last season as we heard Helena is a dive instructor who teaches a Padi course. I’d been keeping my eye on them, thinking if we ever ended up in the same area, maybe I could do the dive course and finially get certified. Well here they were! And they were going to Viani Bay, an anchorage about 35 miles away, near the famous Rainbow Reef, to stay awhile and yes, give dive lessons to anyone interested. It was time for me to take the leap and do this! Suddenly we had our first destination decided and were ready to tackle Fiji.
In Retrospect:
I would like to offer some observations about Curly’s seminar. Curly is a great guy and a very experienced sailor, but that experience comes from another era, an era of real sailors who made do with the basics, and true explorers who went places few had visited and lived among native communities. These are people who needed to trade goods to have fresh things to eat, and they didn’t have many of the electronic geegaws we have today, including chart plotters and Google Earth charts, plus access via Soggy Paws and cruising friends to excellent waypoints (and good advice on where to go in the first place). Curly loves tradition and authentic experiences and often rates places on how interesting they are historically and culturally. He loves Fiji’s traditional culture and prefers things to stay as they’ve always been, and his seminar reflects this.
As it turned out, Curly’s whole thing about fees, showing cruising permits and arguing seems to stem from the Lau Group. No other Fijians ever asked us for fees and I’m sorry he gives people that impression. As for the Lau Group, it used to be off limits unless you paid a lot of money (thousands of dollars) for a special permit to go there. Now, the government has opened the Lau to cruisers, but Fulaga and Vanua Balavu (the main go-to places in the south and north Lau groups) demand a set fee when you go in to do your sevusevu.
The fee is not a secret: it’s a flat $50FJD in Fulaga and $30FJD per person in Vanua Balavu. If it bothers anyone, they don’t have to go. But some of the old-timers like Curly and the director of the ICA rally don’t like the idea of paying Fijians actual money and thus encourage people to argue about paying, perhaps hoping that if everyone does, things will change.
The problem is this is like going to Yellowstone and arguing with the ranger at the gate about park fees–it’s just pointless. Overall, this smacks of trying to convince other people to do your dirty work. If you don’t like it, guys, you go argue, but don’t advise others to do so when all it will do is cause upset and bad feelings. It’s not like the Lau has ever been free of charge.
By the way, sevusevu ceremonies are often optional–while they are called for in some places, you certainly don’t have to do them everywhere you go. If you do opt to sevusevu, the chief appreciates you simply because you showed up and paid your respects! And if your boat were to end up on a reef, the Fijians would be right out there helping you whether you did the ceremony or not–they are very kind, compassionate people.
We have one more issue. The classic sailors’ wisdom is to enter a bay with the sun high and just behind you, giving you the best view into the water. How is a person supposed to achieve this? Do you leave one bay in the dark in order to make it to the next one at the proper time? Do you go out and hove to overnight? What happens if it’s cloudy when you arrive–do you turn around and go back from where you came? Rich and I would have to do this a lot because inevitably whenever we start through a pass, it clouds up and starts to rain. It’s become a running joke: no matter how sunny it is, we get a rain cloud that sees Legacy and rushes over to gray everything up and give us a brief shower. (Apparently clouds can see and play pranks.)
There are two things we do agree with Curly on: taking the winds very seriously, and taking lots of precautions in having guests come visit a boat in Fiji. The winds are feisty here and the shallow seas rambunctious, and it’s just not worth going out on those days with high wind warnings. People who try, often turn back. As for guests go, the problem is both in picking them up and getting them to the airport during high wind warning times. Curly says this is often what causes people to get into trouble and lose their boats. Having seen how rough a pass can get in just moderate winds and seas, I believe it.
And that, in a giant nutshell, is my rant about Curly’s Fiji Cruising seminar. Obviously we have some issues with it, but we still advise our friends to go to the seminar, take the good info and leave the rest. Don’t be intimidated and enjoy Fiji: it’s a wonderful place to cruise.
Since I didn’t get a picture from Curly’s seminar, I’m putting in another gallery of Savusavu pictures. As always, click to enlarge and scroll. –Cyndi
Update: Curly has passed on. Has anyone taken over for him? I don’t know, but his opinions do linger so I’ll leave this page up.
