May 2,1998

RAKIRAKI, FIJI ISLANDS—Searching for a new dive destination with a quality dive operator is a difficult task at best. The input from glossy scuba magazines is somewhat suspect due to the influence of advertisers. The magazines reader polls make locations with the most neoprene in the water rank the highest due to sheer numbers . That same philosophy makes the Big Mac the best hamburger in the world. Just ain’t so.

Digging up info from other divers and non-advertising funded publications like Undercurrents led me to Crystal Divers, Nananu-I-Ra, Fiji Islands. If all my research was to be believed, Dan Grenier and Crystal Divers were the next best thing to sliced bread, pimento loaf and aluminum siding. I had to have one of those sandwiches so I contacted Dan and asked about availability of spots on his boat for an up coming vacation to Fiji. Dan juggled some schedules around and managed to find room for the five divers in my group and gave me feedback about the other locations I was looking at for our second week in Fiji. Nice to have a home town boy giving you the skinny on the best place around for the other half of your dive vacation.

Dan informed me that Crystal Divers had changed locations. He had moved from the Loma Loma Resort in the Lau group to the Raki Raki area of Viti Levu since the reviews I read in Undercurrents had been written. I was a little leery of the change in venue and wondered if the diving would be up to the exalted level promised by Undercurrents. I relayed my uneasiness to Dan and he asked me where else I had been diving. I told him I had been diving in Australia, Hawaii, the Caribbean, and Puget Sound. Dan replied that while he couldn’t vouch for the quality of diving in Puget Sound, diving with him in Fiji would be the best I’d ever done. He was right.

The first day saw the five of us sitting in an open air boat with Dan and his assistant, Buli. The wind was blowing 10 to 20 knots and there were whitecaps frosting the bay as we headed out to dive sites that Dan had discovered from studying charts and watching where the local fishermen liked to drop a line. Dan confirmed his observations by diving with a scooter to ferret out the best. He was right again.

The wind and waves weren’t a problem on the way out to the dive sites, as we were traveling with them. A 15 minute hunt for the submerged buoy heightened the anticipation of the first dive. Dan left his anchor buoys down at 20 feet to keep them out of other boats props and to maintain the quality of the site. GPS navigation made locating the buoys challenging but not impossible.

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