A quick outing to the "sacred islands"

Before the fun, we headed from Vuda Marina to Musket Cove to clean the bottom, on a mooring in clean water. The Marina forbids to do that inside their marina, but sitting 4 weeks in there does foul the bottom and underwater metals.

From there we wanted to see the "sacred islands".  At least a small cruiseship company calls Navadra and the neighboring small island the sacred islands. The benefit for us, there is no one living here, no Sevusevu to be done, but also no bar to have a bite or beer. Drone-pic from "bluelagooncruises"

Getting there from Musket Cove / Malolo Island one currently has to count on a detour, due to some maritime exclusion zones established for the TV series Survivor (US). We didn't even know that shit is still being produced. And so they close parts of the islands & surrounding waters to not have boats show up in their films. The red dotted lines are the exclusion zones. Not all areas are closed for the 6 weeks of filming, but the calendar is kept somewhat secret, or shared as a hard to read screenshot. We avoided it by going around all of them.

On the way up, we passed Modriki, aka Moturiki Islands, and gave it the required 2nm berth. That was the little island Tom Hanks was lost on in the Movie 'Cast Away"

We got to see it from the far, picturesque enough:

Coming from the SW to the sacred island, one has to give the knob of Vanua Lailai a wide berth before turning into the anchorage

Vanua Lailai (=small Vanua) is the knob to the right

With no other boats around, we got a prime spot in the corner, all sand, albeit 20m deep. That is a good test for the windlass after we changed some bearings.

We had been warned, as soon as we let the anchor down, we will be surrounded by Blacktip Reefsharks, and we were happy to see them.

We counted seven, others say there should be more like 15

Supposedly the sharks are used to getting fed from tour boats, so they hang around and wait for scraps.

Another boat came in "Planet Express", and skipper Adam jumped right in and got this shot:

Closer to sunset a charter catamaran came into the anchorage too, and we felt a bit crowded and called it a night.