Day 168 Date line at Fiji

The 3 boat regatta of Southern Star, Paddy West and Liahona sail between Duff reef and Heemskeraq reef and enter Nanuka pass. Duff reef is famous to readers of the yachting magazines as last year a yacht with a man and his wife aboard ran aground in the middle of the night and had to be rescued. They had been sailing in rough weather for 3 days and fell asleep from exhaustion. They were awakened by the boat hitting the reef. Most yachties seems to know this story.
We cross the geographic date line at 0830 as we enter Fiji waters. This is a little anti-climatic as we had set the calendar ahead several days ago. If we had caught a fish at W179º59.99 and pulled it in at E179º59.99 could we say we had been dragging it for a day?
In the pass, we follow the South shore of Taveuni Island for most of the morning. Already we are getting a feel for the size of Fiji. Taveuni is one of the smaller islands yet it goes on for hours. Finally we round the point and the island of Vanua Levu comes into view. It is the second largest island in Fiji and Taveuni is dwarfed by it. Viewing it from the sea gives two impressions. It is heavily forested with a variety of different kinds of trees from palms to pines. Secondly, there are a lot of individual houses. These are not villages but large houses on the hills overlooking the ocean. Fiji may be a poor country (the lowest GDP per capita of any country we have visited) but there is clearly a lot of wealth in the hands of a fair number of people. Since Indo-Fijians cannot own land, these are either lease hold properties or they are owned by Fijians. The literature says that the Fijians are the poorer of the two ethnic groups so I wonder who owns these houses.
We finally arrive at the Copra Shed in Savusavu where they send a man out in a small boat to help us tie up to a mooring ball. The same boatman comes back 20 minutes later with 3 officials who carry out all the entry procedures except the payments needed. Since we have no local currency, we will have to go to the police station tomorrow and pay. The officials are all very pleasant and fairly efficient - maybe because we finally got smart and had some soda on board to offer them.
By the time we are moored, it is dark and we are starving so we head to shore to find a beer and a curry. It is not hard to find a curry since almost 50% of the 850,000 Fijians are Indo-Fijian (originally from India) and they operate most of the business since they cannot own land. The Indians were imported to work in the sugar cane fields because there was a law prohibiting native Fijians from that work. At the end of the day they end up with ethnic tensions, repeated coups and high unemployment. I would love to see Joe Bower's (Harvard Business School) analysis of Fiji and have him explain how they could have messed it up so badly.