I made my first visit to Fiji in 1973, where I set up land-based diving programs to dive some extraordinarily lush reefs. Despite the excellent diving we were experiencing from hotel bases, I was convinced that a live-aboard cruiser would enable us to dive reefs that weren't reachable from any hotel base.
I was delighted when I heard of a retired school teacher named Eric Dowdall, who had a 40-foot boat which (by squeezing) could accommodate six divers. For several years, I delighted groups of divers by booking them with Eric and his wife Keresi. The food was fabulous, and we dived our heads off every day we were there. In later years there were bigger boats which could accommodate larger groups, but as a great classic of diving which has in many ways never been equalled, the Sta Reta brings back memories of how diving was when the sport was still in its early days.
Fiji is famed for the intense color of its invertebrate life and its profusion of fish, offering divers walls covered with soft coral colonies, coral patches with dozens of anemones inhabited by hundreds of clownfish and other photo subjects such as what we see in this gallery and my YouTube show
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