May 18, 1998

Dear Divers,

My wife and I consider ourselves intermediate skilled divers with 175 dives under our weight belts. We have been diving for ten years and have traveled to Palau, Yap, Honduras, Belize, Mexico, Hawaii, and four trips to Fiji. We are avid readers of Undercurrent and have found your reports on dive locations to be valuable for vacation planning. In 1997, we were intrigued with your description of Crystal Divers at the Loma Loma resort on Vanau Balavu, Fiji, owned and operated by Dan Grenier. We spent a week of our vacation there and looked forward to returning in 1998 for an extended two week dive vacation. Unfortunately, Crystal Divers left Loma Loma at the end of 1997.

This report is for your readers who have previously dove with Crystal Divers and wonder what has become of Dan Grenier. We have just completed two weeks of adventure diving with Dan and Buli at his new location on Nananu-I-Ra Island off the Northern Shore of Viti Levu in Bligh waters just 2 1/2 hours by taxi from Nadi. There is no need to mourn the departure of Dan from Loma Loma for we have observed some of the most spectacular combination of soft coral and hard corals, reef fish and pelagic fish on dive sites newly discovered by Dan. These sites will add a new chapter to diving in Fiji.

Dan is discovering new dive sites previously unexplored by existing dive operations who have not ventured to the outer side of the reef. These sites not only have the glorious soft coral Fiji is famous for but present an opportunity to view large pelagics. One such site is named Neptune Gardens which is a series of bommies in 80’ of water and rise to within 15’ of the surface perfect for hanging out during a safety stop. The bommies are carpeted with layers of brilliant multicolored soft corals, pristine hard corals, bubble coral, sea fans, tunicates, rock scallops, tridacna clams, and teaming with thousands of brightly colored anthias and fusiliers. Macro photographers would love the abundant pipefish, nudibranchs, shrimp, crabs and flat worms on the coral. We observed a family of three lion fish, juvenile sweet lips, stonefish, moray eels, coral rock cod, semicircle and emperor angelfish, bannerfish, and batfish. Photographers should bring their wide angle lenses to capture the lapis blue and purple sea fans as large as ten feet in diameter. As we swam from bommie to bommie, we encountered trevally, wahoo, snappers, jacks, blue jellyfish, and schools of pickhandle barracuda that congregate around the bommies. During our safety stop, we would hang on to the top of the bommie in the current and be awash in anthias and entertained by the schooling barracuda and trevally.

On another dive to Neptune Gardens, I literally bumped into a Queensland Grouper of enormous size 6-8 feet long and maybe 800 pounds which left me breathless. My wife and Dan were exploring one of the many coral lined caves in the bommie and were greeted by this grouper as they emerged. On another day we observed a Bumphead Maori Wrasse of smaller stature, may be two hundred pounds. White tip and grey reef sharks were observed on nearly every dive. A sea turtle and schools of bumphead parrot fish and titan triggerfish were also observed. A week after we left, Dan reported seeing a 14 foot hammerhead shark and an eagle ray at “Curtains” which is another dive site near Neptune’s Gardens.

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