Our first diving destination in Fiji was Volivoli, at the northern tip of the island of Viti Levu. Viti Levu is also the biggest island, so it's referred to as "the mainland". We coincidentally visited Fiji's three biggest islands in descending order - Viti Levu, Vanua Levu and Taveuni.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/E87nPLCSrpQqUVFf9

This was our first friend meet-up of the trip - our buddy Glen flew in from North Carolina. We first met him as part of our diving group called "Race the the Bottom". Unfortunately our group photo came out weird, but it's the only one we remembered to take! Many of the underwater photos and videos in the album were taken by him - thanks Glen!

Fiji, and Volivoli in particular, is known for excellent soft corals, and it delivered! It's also near a marine preserve, but unfortunately the winds were too strong for us to boat over there. We'll have to go back!  The dives closer to shore were still excellent with an abundance of hard and soft corals. Almost every dive ended on top of a reef that was covered in tiny reef fish darting to and fro.

 Soft corals take many different forms, but the key is that they don't build hard structures like "stony" corals. They can be smooth and bendable (leather corals), long and wiry (whip corals), flat and fanlike (gorgonians), flowery and pulsing (Xenia corals), rubbery and treelike (carnation corals), etc.

We had been led to believe that the beach at the resort had a beautiful house reef wall, and we planned to dive there every afternoon. In fact the visibility was so bad it took us 3 tries to even find anything underwater, and we could barely see each other if we weren't touching! While we didn't find anything resembling a "reef" or a "wall", we did find some lovely coral heads with nudibranch, anemone shrimp, and even a juvenile harlequin sweetlips!

Here's a pair of Chromodoris lochi nudibranchs mating. Nudibranchs are hermaphrodites, with both male and female sexual organs on their right side. They can mate "reciprocally" where each inserts their male organ into the female organ of their partner.  We didn't capture them doing that, just the old fashioned one male, one female configuration. 

Scorpionfish are famously difficult to find, their mottled bodies blend in very well to stones and reefs. But be careful, they have a nasty "sting" from venomous spines.

There are several species of "anemone fish" that live in ... you guessed it - anemones! Some species of these fish live in only a single species of anemone, others are generalists. The clownfish is the most famous, but there are about 30 other species with varying ranges. They are fun to photograph because they come up to defend their anemone but stay relatively still. This photo is of the Fiji anemonefish (Amphiprion barberi) which lives only in Fiji and nearby Tonga and Samoa.

As always, more details are in the album: 

Volivoli, Fiji