Marc's Public Blog - Diving

A couple of hours after arriving in Suva, we boarded the Aggressor III (which used to be Aggressor II), and found out that they only had 7 out of the 10 possible guest, served by a crew of 6. That was a pretty good ratio :)

The rooms were the standard double bed with single bed on top so that they could host either a couple or two roomates that each get a bed. The room wasn't great, but typical for a boat, and good enough for the trip (no pictures, it's just too tight to get anything useful without a fisheye lens)

The boat's moto was indeed "dive, eat, sleep", and it was close to that. We had 4 to 5 dives a day (depending on whether we had a night dive on a specific day), and that indeed left little time for anything else if you also add dumping the pictures off your camera and sorting them after each time (which I did so that I didn't have 2000+ pictures to sort when I got home).
The food was pretty good, the crew was absolutely fantastic, and the captain was super friendly. He was quite interested in my GPS setup (Garmin Vista HCx on the window, linked to my laptop to nRoute in vmware with Bluecharts maps, to get tracks and dive sites as shown below). In return, he was nice enough to share his windows laptop with a GPRS card that gave occasional internet access when we were close enough to a shore with a suitable cell site.

/p>
If you want it, here's a GPS track of the dives and boating with did in the Aggressor .

Anyway, there go the diving pictures I took (not counting the first one :):

Mmmh, lobster for dinner




Fiji is known for its soft coral. Beautiful colors indeed.






There's a scorpion fish in there, see it?


Ok, you get a second chance


A nice octopus, a bit shy and didn't quite like to be touched :)




A tiny Orang-Outang crab




Ok, one more chance at that Scorpion Fish




Those little fellows hide in the sand, pop their heads up when they think they're safe, and let the current bring nutrients to their mouths

Ok, so you didn't do very well spotting the scorpion fish? Here's some help with a video of a moving scorpion fish
Also, I really like this plant that changes color when you touch it .

You can see more in my Best Of Fiji Aggressor III diving pictures , and the rest of my Fiji Aggressor III diving pictures .

Thankfully, we had a much better equipped photographer, Alex, on our boat, with a DSLR and fancy marine case. He was nice enough to share his pictures with us. You can find all of them here , and a few samples below:

Jennifer and me








If you're cool, you take your sunglasses under water too :)




Alex, the photographer at work

That said, the boat was a bit more than just diving. We were allowed to fish in most of the waters we were in, and caught the occasional Tuna that we ate on the boat. We also stopped ashore one evening for a local Island Fijian Village visit, and the few times we were close enough to shore to get internet access, I was able to swap mails and patches with Ralf on Rig3, on which I was working a bit during the little downtime I did have.

Food was quite good, considering we were on a boat with a small kitchen




We got some good and fresh sashimi from that fish we caught on the boat


All dressed up before the village visit


Bula! (welcome)


The Village kids sang and danced for us


Mixing the kava we drank as part of the Kava ceremony


Drinking Kava | We were invited to dance with them


We loved playing with those little hermit crabs :)

You can find more pictures from the Aggressor III and the Village Visit

Anyway, those days were tiring, but it was a great week. The only minus for the Aggressor is that they boat you back in the middle of the day after only one dive on the last day instead of boating you back at night after a full day of diving, like most liveonboards. Considering that ear plugs are cheap, I don't see why they do that.
The rest was great though, it was a fun week.

Anyway, you can find all the pictures from the Aggressor III trip , including Alex's.