Koro Island

Stardate October 11, 2023

We left Paradise Resort and Taveuni at 7 am for the long stretch across the Koro Sea to Koro Island.  (No chart plot - I forgot to hit 'save'.)  Pretty uneventful on the crossing, good wind on our beam.  A little rolly at times, but otherwise a good run.

We pulled into the little harbor on Koro Island where Navionics had indicated there were moorings as well as an anchorage.  Hah.  Nick made a pass with his fish finder on and announced that the bottom was all coral.  Not to mention pretty deep.  There was one mooring ball visible and Nick couldn’t snag it.  I proposed to anchor, drop the dinghy, and help Nick get moored.  He agreed and hovered while I got the dink ready.  

At some point he tried again and this time got his boat hook stuck in the mooring ball’s line.  He did manage to get a mooring line attached, but was left holding his boat hook while I finished prepping the dink.  I finally got over there and it took some time to untwist his boat hook.

In the process, I stumbled across a second mooring ball, mostly submerged.  Nick got on my boat and we raised the anchor.  As well as a piece of coral easily the size of the anchor.  It was stuck tight and remained on the anchor off the bow.  I should have taken pictures.  We started circling back to that mooring and along comes a native in a launch.  I hailed him and asked him if he could help us moor.  He indicated yes and waved his arm in the ‘follow me’ motion.  He proceeded right past the mooring I was intending to use, still waving ‘follow me.’  I did, with Nick on the bow.  We kept exchanging glances of ‘Where is this guy going?” As we followed the launch.  At the point where the launch proceeded across a very visible reef, I said "Bugger this,” and turned back.  He never came back and we don’t know what in the heck he was thinking of, leading a sailboat onto a reef.

Nick got in the dink and guided my mooring lines through the mooring.  The moorings were not in good shape.  The last Navionics post was in 2017 and they had seen considerable wear since then.  There was no thimble through which to put your boat’s mooring line; you had to thread your line through the loop made by the mooring down line.  This resulted over time of the wearing of the poly line loop to the point where only half the line was left.   And the wind was up, coming over the island and making for a rocky mooring, which we hadn’t expected.  Needless to say we both kept our Anchor Sentry apps active during the night.  

Oh, and we spent twenty minutes hammering away at that piece of coral before it finally dropped off the anchor.  Again, I shoulda taken pics...