Weather Helmed

Musket Cove has long been a cruiser’s haven in Fiji.  Located on Manolo Island, MC offers a fairly calm mooring field, laundry, hot showers, a mini-market, bars, restaurants, and access to a resort pool.  No trip to Fiji would be complete without some sort of resort relaxation, so we hung out at MC for a few days to take advantage of all the amenities.  We took showers everyday, did our laundry, laid by the pool and had some excellent dining experiences.  There is a small hut – a bar! – near the dinghy dock and on Sunday evenings, they have a set-up where you buy your choice of raw, marinated meats (steak, fish, sausages, pork), along with various ready-made sides (salad, rolls, baked potatoes, etc), and you cook your own meal.  So, we all purchased our dinners and then the guys took the meat and elbowed their way up to the grill, I mean the barby.  The food was delicious!  Plus the atmosphere was quite fun with groups of loud raucous aussies and new zealanders and a few yachties laughing and enjoying themselves. If you go there on a weekday, you can order your meats/sides from the Traders mini-market and cook it at the bar’s barbys later.  We also recommend the little restaurant (if you can call it that) on the patio of Traders.  The menu was limited but the food was good, just be prepared to wait a while.  We can’t say many good things about the resort that is right there next to the marina except that the pool is nice.  We had breakfast there one morning and it was a bit of a debacle.  Needless to say, we avoided the restaurant after that.  Our favorite discovery at MC was Ananda’s, a lovely outdoor restaurant on the far side of the airport runway, down towards Plantation Resort.  Ananda’s did not seem to be directly related to any of the resorts and so had no unfriendly attitude towards cruisers who just show up and want to eat.  The food there was AMAZING!  By far the best restaurant food we had (outside of Pt. Denerau of course! ha).  They had a 3-course meal option that included soup, a bbq’d entree, and dessert.  Everything we got was fantastic.  And, the price was pretty awesome.  And, the guys said that Anandas served up the strongest drinks 🙂

If you’re not a cruiser, I wouldn’t suggest coming to any of the resorts here on the west side of Manolo, near the marina.  The water is not very clear anywhere near the shoreline, although I guess there was a pretty nice reef farther out into the bay; the resort near the marina and Plantation Resort are both fairly large and were overrun with kids, so it might not be the best place to relax.  We just walked through Plantation briefly and it looked like a family summer camp!  There are several other resorts in Fiji that are extremely family friendly, but if you have kids, you might want to check out those that have special programs/activities for kids if you expect/desire to get some down time yourself 🙂

For cruisers, MC is the perfect place to hang out for a few days to fill up on water, fuel and rest as you wander around the islands.  The moorings were cheap, the water good, and I think all of us on the boat appreciated a few nights of sound sleep in a calm cove where we didn’t have to deal with the anchor or the swell!