Mamanuca and Yasawa groups
Yasawa and Mamanuca GroupsMamanuca & Yasawa Groups Travelling
The 50 or so of the Mamanuca and Yasawa groups are just a touch of elegance with a mighty - and heavenly - punching. Although they are easy to reach from Nadi, the area is home to everything that creates daydreams: rushing palm trees, obscene water, dazzling sand and an equally light smile.
Mamanuca' s 20 or so picturesque reefs and islets criss-cross the great Laguna of Malolo Barrier Ref and Viti Levu. It is a repository of windsurf break, marine tortoises, marine shark and huge schoolings of colorful tropic fisher. The Yasawas Volcano Archipelago rewards the visitor with lush green waters, beautiful sandy shores, colourful green corals and rugged coves.
Group Mamanuca and Yasawa
There are a number of archipelagos situated just westwards of Vitu Levu, Fiji's biggest island: Mamanuca and the Yasawa Group. Above is on Navadra Iceland, at the northerly end of the Mamanucas. Departing Port Denarau for the south end of the Mamanucas, we had a plan to work our way through the Yasawas to the south.
We' ve expected that the maps of this area, especially the Yasawas, are bad. Mamanucas seemed to be precise, but most Yasawa maps lacked deep measurements, although the landmasses and dangers seemed to be precisely placed. The first stop was Musket Cove, a favourite mooring with several shore based destinations.
There were at least forty vessels at anchor, plus about twenty others in the small Musket Cove Marin. A short stroll along the street to the top of the archipelago gave an outstanding view to the eastward to Vitu Levu and to the westward to the dock. So we had our lunches and later the sundown at the pool at Musket Cove Resort.
The next stop was on Navadra Iceland (at the top of this post) at the northern end of the Mamanuca-Chains. That was the exact opposite of Musket Cove: an inhabited isle where no one else was. Navarre had beautiful sandy beach and an interesting landscape. This steeply sloping isle at the northwestern edge of the mooring formed an outstanding luncheon and sundeck.
Coming from Navadra we traversed the Yasawa Group and stayed our first overnight at anchor at the northern end of Waya Island. Farther northerly we found an ideal mooring in the cliffs off the western side of Nanuya Balavu Island, with a nice sand and cliffs behind us.
While the mooring was reasonably quiet, some western waves reached us, so we switched off the flopper-stopper. Further northerly we drove through the safe haven off Nanuya Island, known as "Blue Lagoon" after the Brooke Shields film shot here. A number of vessels were already moored (first photo below), the small cruiser Reef Endeavour was close by, and sailors from the town of Sese on Matacawalevu Island crossed the cove.
Instead we found an ideal place all to ourselves, hidden in a hole in the cliffs just outside Yaromo Island. Our high point of our stay with the Yasawa group was the island Sawa-I-Lau. We came to this mooring to see the lime stone caverns there, but the landscape alone was definitely there.
The island of Sawa-I-Lau rises above the mooring, with cliffs on all sides, and the meteorological conditions had caused the erosion of complicated formation into the crags. The guys from the other two ships that were moored with us had come on land at the same moment that we were all putting on our snorkelling equipment just before we went into the wad.