NAI'A, Fiji Islands: General Info
Professional dive guides & underwater photographers agree that Fiji is among the world's five or six most visually dazzling dive destinations. For years we have loved this island nation like a second homeland; & we always will. The reefs of the Fiji islands are so colorful & full of bustling fish & coral species that when you dive here you'll experience a living kaleidoscope of nearly psychedelic intensity. Fiji diving is a natural underwater high -- Get Down to Get High! -- like no other we have experienced in almost 3 decades of adventure travel worldwide. The Fijian people are so uncommonly gracious & sweet-spirited, that most clients who return report to us they felt fully refreshed by their experience in Fiji. This place changes people forever. It certainly changed us for the better. No person we have ever sent to the Fiji Islands has returned from their Fiji diving adventures with anything but grateful & sincere praise for the diving delights, & the warm hospitality, they experienced. Now enter another exciting factor into this Fiji Islands equation -- the Nai'a.
There's no better way to taste the magic of Fiji's remote isles, the unsullied visual magic of Fiji diving, than the Nai'a, a graceful, elegantly appointed 120-foot exploratory motor-sailor with 9 deluxe private staterooms & a slide + video theater. All the cabins have private baths & many elegant amenities. Great cuisine, roomy salon & sun deck, two 25' power launches & immaculate woodwork are other pluses. This live-aboard scuba diving vessel has E-6 photo processing, a top-notch chef with an international flair & a genius for using local provender, a strong savvy crew, a supply of cameras, video recorders & dive computers for rental, & more.
Now NAI'A dive charters are more than chomping a regulator. The gracious interior of NAIA is constructed of native Fijian hardwoods, burnished to a sheen. Her decks & cabins are clean as a whistle. Because vessels of this impeccable quality are few in the South Pacific, the Nai'a naturally attracts clients who have refined their tastes over many years of travel & are used to dining well. The Nai'a chef never leaves them disappointed. Using fresh local fish, fruits, vegetables & wines, the vessels galley will delight even the most discriminating palate with new surprises & delicacies every day. Now, since you know how four or more energetic dives a day can give any red-blooded adventurer the royal munchies, a live-aboard menu is not of passing significance. You'll feel pampered from the word go on the Nai'a. This is as good as it gets on live-aboards in the incomparable Fiji Islands.
Perhaps the best aspect of the NAI'A crew, from our viewpoint, is the skipper Robbie Barrel (pronounced: Ba-REHL) & his sister Alexx, who founded the vessel company & who manage it with true loving care. This dive vessel, & the beautiful Fijian people, & their colorful waters, are the life passion of the Barrel family. We happen to feel pretty fondly towards these folks since, by sheer coincidence, the Barrels grew up as good friends of the Oahu family of our co-owner, Susan Hessburg. They run their family show the same way we do, with a lot of attention toward the personal touch. That is the way that dedicated diving families are, when they love their work, & live their work -- day & night. We like to say that "The FAMILY THAT DIVES TOGETHER THRIVES TOGETHER !!" (TM)
Robbie's ocean-going family aside, most objective dive pros we've talked with at trade shows, & gatherings of scuba professionals around the world, seem to agree that the Nai'a ranks solidly as one of the 4 or 5 best 5-star live-aboard diving vessels anywhere in the Pacific. We confidently rank it as the finest live-aboard in the South Pacific. The NAIA team keeps improving its Fiji diving program every year with new ideas, new fun twists to their routes, new reef surprises, new delights for the clients they treat so very well. You want big fun, far from the madding crowd? Fiji diving is the answer. And live-aboard diving with the Naia is the underline to that definitive answer, we feel. We've got it all ready to roll for you.
Just give us a jingle & we'll turn you on to an adventure on Skipper Barrel's Nai'a that will reshape your heart from the inside out. That's the hidden magic of Nai'a dive charters. That's because you will soon learn, as we did, & as scores of our good clients learn each season: Fiji diving is more than just dive travel. Fiji diving is life. Life in a microcosm. Life in abundance. Life worth living. Life to the Nth degree ! If you ever hear a faint hint of drifting in our phone conversations, there's a good reason. Not one day, not one single day of our lives passes when we do not think for a while about Fiji diving, & about the healthful energies of our dive tours to the Fiji Islands. These great memories become permanent daydreams that drift to the surface of the conscious mind when you least expect it. They just pop up randomly like little Spring blooms. You snip them to get some work done, to help more good clients with the best of your alacrity & vigor. Then the Fiji diving bloom pops back again, indefatigably. So we are constantly having to get a grip, grab the keyboard, grab the phone & get back to work. We have hundreds of promises to keep. And miles to go before we sleep. But the Fiji diving spell keeps on keeping on. That's because Fiji diving is a way of life, not a diversion. Fiji scuba diving & sailing on a golden yacht like the Nai'a are LIVING with a capital "live."
SHIP’S FEATURES (Observations by NAI'A Founder Rob Barrel):
NAI'A is a true expeditionary ship designed especially for the tropical Western Pacific. Originally built as a private sailing yacht, NAI'A is one of ten sister-ships designed by famed mega-yacht designer W. de Vries Lentsch & built in the Camenga yard in Amsterdam. NAI'A spent ten years in the Caribbean passenger trade before I found her & brought her to Fiji at the beginning of 1993, where she was stripped to a bare hull & completely rebuilt to the highest modern standards. NAI'A combines the famous Dutch knack for ship design with my own experience from 15 years as captain of successively larger & more expensive private yachts. She is optimized for maximum stability & range under power or motorsailing. Her custom designed 103-ft rotating wing spar is the most efficient mast available (& the largest of its kind). It contributes both to her comfort & her efficiency at sea. The crow's nest on the mast, fifty feet above the water, is the ideal spot from which to guide the ship through the narrow passages common to Fiji's outlying islands & from which to yell "thar she blows" during the annual whale expeditions to the incredibly exotic island nation of Tonga.
NAI'A design & construction give her the range to explore the entire South Pacific comfortably & economically. Her extensive itinerary, which allows divers to experience the finest Fiji diving, would not be possible with any lesser Fiji live-aboards.
Because NAI'A was designed to carry passengers -- rather than fish or oil-field roughnecks -- she is built around her passenger accommodation area rather than her engines. The most comfortable part of the NAI'A -- the middle -- has all her accommodations, while the engine room is relegated to the very aft end of the ship. Considerable attention went into the construction of the staterooms to ensure fire-proofing & sound-proofing. The result is a Fiji dive vessel which is extraordinarily comfortable & quiet as a ship can be.
STATEROOMS:
NAI'A has accommodation for 18 passengers in 9 staterooms, 8 with private en-suite facilities. Four staterooms have double beds, three have both a double bed & a single bunk above, & two have twin bunk beds. All the staterooms are larger than those on most dive vessels, with plenty of stowage for gear, & they are tastefully decorated in a muted Fijian motif. While strobe charging is best done in the camera room, each room has both 110 & 220 volt power to run whatever electrical toys & various fun gizmos you might wish to bring. The Barrels have thought of everything, & they've honed this yacht to a faretheewell.
COMFORTABLE, HOMEY SALON:
NAI'A's main salon is perhaps her most eye-catching feature. Carefully crafted out of local timbers, the 625-square-foot room serves as lounge, theater, classroom, & dining room. The three tables in the salon are showpiece items, built as a gift to NAI'A by the Fijian carpenters who refinished the ship. Made of alternating planks of the four native timbers used elsewhere throughout the ship, the tables are polished to a high sheen. Wokring on clunky camera repairs upon the dining room table is grounds for immediate keel-hauling, the skipper says (with an exceptionally serious wink)!
DELICIOUS SOUTH PACIFIC CUISINE !
The galley is on the main deck aft of the salon & there Manasa the Master Chef works his culinary magic. Word to the wise: a charter on NAI'A is not the time to start a serious diet. It’s a really good thing the meals are healthfully prepared, because most people eat more than they would if their will-power were better. We serve a cold breakfast of toast & cereal at sunrise, a full breakfast after the first dive, lunch after the second dive, snacks after the third dive, & a white-tablecloth & complementary wine dinner after the dusk dive. Coffee, tea, water, & juice are available 24 hours a day. Manasa has been with NAI'A since the beginning, despite being headhunted by the other live-aboards & several of Fiji's better resorts. Day after day, Manasa serves up a wide variety of meals, all utilizing locally grown produce & meat. The NAI'A crew catches fresh fish with regularity, & the vessel’s fresh fish barbecue is something to write home to Mom about, truly. A respected New Zealand publisher is now working on a NAI'A cookbook which features Manasa's inspiring recipes alongside underwater photographs.
DIVE DECKS:
The dive deck on NAI'A is unconventional in several respects. First, it is huge, bridging the entire 30-foot beam of the ship, & it is located amidships -- comfortably removed from the clutter of the working deck aft. During the charter, the crew take care of filling the tanks & loading gear into the skiffs from the aft dive platform, while divers have the uncluttered dive deck forward in which to suit up & listen to the very thorough dive briefings. Only masks, fins, & camera gear are stored forward, while the heavy & unwieldy tanks & BCs remain aft. Divers returning to the dive deck are treated to hot deck showers & clean dry towels at the end of every dive. NAI'A has a small laundry aboard where towels & tablecloths are washed daily.
RELAXATION AREAS of VESSEL:
Once the scuba tanks have been moved aft at the start of the charter, the dive deck cushions come out & the place becomes a lounging area sheltered from the mid-day sun. For those who want to be outside in the sun, the whole roof area over the dive deck & the camera room is a sundeck open to undiluted rays. During long passages the sundeck is used to carry NAI'A's two rigid inflatable skiffs. The pulpit over NAI'A's bow is another great place to lounge. Roomy enough for six to sit, a dozen thoroughly excited people can stand there watching bow-riding dolphins zip along playfully. Talk about a visual treat that’s tough to forget ! This is the Fiji live-aboard by which all others are, & will be, measured.
PERSONAL MESSAGE from NAI'A CAPT. ROB BARREL:
NAI'A is owned & managed by myself, Rob Barrel, & my sister Alexx Edwards & her husband Todd Edwards. Alexx & I grew up in Kailua, Oahu of Hawaii, where we learned to dive, sail, & windsurf before attending college on the mainland. After two years on the pre-law track at Harvard, a serendipitous confluence of coincidence led me to take a one year leave-of-absence to sail around the world. I didn't make it past the South Pacific, & the one year leave stretched into eleven years as better & better sailing opportunities kept coming along.
I finally returned to college in 1988, this time at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I studied dolphin behavior with Dr. Ken Norris. Although my return to college was interrupted by several 6-month yacht deliveries, I eventually graduated with highest honors in anthropology. NAI'A was conceived as part of my graduation thesis: the ideal floating laboratory from which to apply anthropological tools to observe & come to understand a community of wild dolphins. There are many elements involved in making the dream come true, only two of which are a University degree & a 120-foot ship. But those two are a significant start & the project is slowly evolving. I hope some day to know a family of dolphins as well as Jane Goodall knows the chimps at Gombe.
Meanwhile my sister Alexx met Todd, married, started a family, & they built their home on an island in a lake in the middle of nowhere in Florida. Perfectly suited for life in a third-world country, Todd & Alexx came to Fiji shortly after NAI'A did to help rebuild the boat. They have been running the office & the shoreside support for NAI'A ever since.
The fourth key member of the NAI'A home team is Cat Holloway. Cat learned to dive in Papua New Guinea when she was 17 & she has been working in or around the dive industry ever since, most recently as editor of the Australian magazine, Scuba Diver. Cat came to Fiji several years ago to write about NAI'A & the Fiji experience & was so taken with it all that she never returned. (Beware: this magic happens to a lot of people! ) She runs the diving aboard NAI'A & tries, in the few days between charters, to write the occasional magazine article.
U.S. DIVE TRAVEL's ENDORSEMENT: The core of the NAIA family is her Fijian crew, eleven of the friendliest & most able sailors anywhere. Most have been with the ship since the beginning, & there is every indication that ship & crew will all grow old together. Fijians are among the friendliest people on earth, so it is no wonder that NAIA's clients consistently rate the crew as the very best in the business. There simply is no ship like NAI’A in the live-aboard diving world. The Barrel family knows dive vacations like the makers of Godiva chocolates know their trades. We invite you to join us. We would all be honored to serve you with an adventure-diving experience that will be a splendid memory for the rest of your life. Nai'a dive packages are vacations that change divers profoundly, for the better -- always.
There's no better way to taste the magic of Fiji's remote isles, the unsullied visual magic of Fiji diving, than the Nai'a, a graceful, elegantly appointed 120-foot exploratory motor-sailor with 9 deluxe private staterooms & a slide + video theater. All the cabins have private baths & many elegant amenities. Great cuisine, roomy salon & sun deck, two 25' power launches & immaculate woodwork are other pluses. This live-aboard scuba diving vessel has E-6 photo processing, a top-notch chef with an international flair & a genius for using local provender, a strong savvy crew, a supply of cameras, video recorders & dive computers for rental, & more.
Now NAI'A dive charters are more than chomping a regulator. The gracious interior of NAIA is constructed of native Fijian hardwoods, burnished to a sheen. Her decks & cabins are clean as a whistle. Because vessels of this impeccable quality are few in the South Pacific, the Nai'a naturally attracts clients who have refined their tastes over many years of travel & are used to dining well. The Nai'a chef never leaves them disappointed. Using fresh local fish, fruits, vegetables & wines, the vessels galley will delight even the most discriminating palate with new surprises & delicacies every day. Now, since you know how four or more energetic dives a day can give any red-blooded adventurer the royal munchies, a live-aboard menu is not of passing significance. You'll feel pampered from the word go on the Nai'a. This is as good as it gets on live-aboards in the incomparable Fiji Islands.
Perhaps the best aspect of the NAI'A crew, from our viewpoint, is the skipper Robbie Barrel (pronounced: Ba-REHL) & his sister Alexx, who founded the vessel company & who manage it with true loving care. This dive vessel, & the beautiful Fijian people, & their colorful waters, are the life passion of the Barrel family. We happen to feel pretty fondly towards these folks since, by sheer coincidence, the Barrels grew up as good friends of the Oahu family of our co-owner, Susan Hessburg. They run their family show the same way we do, with a lot of attention toward the personal touch. That is the way that dedicated diving families are, when they love their work, & live their work -- day & night. We like to say that "The FAMILY THAT DIVES TOGETHER THRIVES TOGETHER !!" (TM)
Robbie's ocean-going family aside, most objective dive pros we've talked with at trade shows, & gatherings of scuba professionals around the world, seem to agree that the Nai'a ranks solidly as one of the 4 or 5 best 5-star live-aboard diving vessels anywhere in the Pacific. We confidently rank it as the finest live-aboard in the South Pacific. The NAIA team keeps improving its Fiji diving program every year with new ideas, new fun twists to their routes, new reef surprises, new delights for the clients they treat so very well. You want big fun, far from the madding crowd? Fiji diving is the answer. And live-aboard diving with the Naia is the underline to that definitive answer, we feel. We've got it all ready to roll for you.
Just give us a jingle & we'll turn you on to an adventure on Skipper Barrel's Nai'a that will reshape your heart from the inside out. That's the hidden magic of Nai'a dive charters. That's because you will soon learn, as we did, & as scores of our good clients learn each season: Fiji diving is more than just dive travel. Fiji diving is life. Life in a microcosm. Life in abundance. Life worth living. Life to the Nth degree ! If you ever hear a faint hint of drifting in our phone conversations, there's a good reason. Not one day, not one single day of our lives passes when we do not think for a while about Fiji diving, & about the healthful energies of our dive tours to the Fiji Islands. These great memories become permanent daydreams that drift to the surface of the conscious mind when you least expect it. They just pop up randomly like little Spring blooms. You snip them to get some work done, to help more good clients with the best of your alacrity & vigor. Then the Fiji diving bloom pops back again, indefatigably. So we are constantly having to get a grip, grab the keyboard, grab the phone & get back to work. We have hundreds of promises to keep. And miles to go before we sleep. But the Fiji diving spell keeps on keeping on. That's because Fiji diving is a way of life, not a diversion. Fiji scuba diving & sailing on a golden yacht like the Nai'a are LIVING with a capital "live."
SHIP’S FEATURES (Observations by NAI'A Founder Rob Barrel):
NAI'A is a true expeditionary ship designed especially for the tropical Western Pacific. Originally built as a private sailing yacht, NAI'A is one of ten sister-ships designed by famed mega-yacht designer W. de Vries Lentsch & built in the Camenga yard in Amsterdam. NAI'A spent ten years in the Caribbean passenger trade before I found her & brought her to Fiji at the beginning of 1993, where she was stripped to a bare hull & completely rebuilt to the highest modern standards. NAI'A combines the famous Dutch knack for ship design with my own experience from 15 years as captain of successively larger & more expensive private yachts. She is optimized for maximum stability & range under power or motorsailing. Her custom designed 103-ft rotating wing spar is the most efficient mast available (& the largest of its kind). It contributes both to her comfort & her efficiency at sea. The crow's nest on the mast, fifty feet above the water, is the ideal spot from which to guide the ship through the narrow passages common to Fiji's outlying islands & from which to yell "thar she blows" during the annual whale expeditions to the incredibly exotic island nation of Tonga.
NAI'A design & construction give her the range to explore the entire South Pacific comfortably & economically. Her extensive itinerary, which allows divers to experience the finest Fiji diving, would not be possible with any lesser Fiji live-aboards.
Because NAI'A was designed to carry passengers -- rather than fish or oil-field roughnecks -- she is built around her passenger accommodation area rather than her engines. The most comfortable part of the NAI'A -- the middle -- has all her accommodations, while the engine room is relegated to the very aft end of the ship. Considerable attention went into the construction of the staterooms to ensure fire-proofing & sound-proofing. The result is a Fiji dive vessel which is extraordinarily comfortable & quiet as a ship can be.
STATEROOMS:
NAI'A has accommodation for 18 passengers in 9 staterooms, 8 with private en-suite facilities. Four staterooms have double beds, three have both a double bed & a single bunk above, & two have twin bunk beds. All the staterooms are larger than those on most dive vessels, with plenty of stowage for gear, & they are tastefully decorated in a muted Fijian motif. While strobe charging is best done in the camera room, each room has both 110 & 220 volt power to run whatever electrical toys & various fun gizmos you might wish to bring. The Barrels have thought of everything, & they've honed this yacht to a faretheewell.
COMFORTABLE, HOMEY SALON:
NAI'A's main salon is perhaps her most eye-catching feature. Carefully crafted out of local timbers, the 625-square-foot room serves as lounge, theater, classroom, & dining room. The three tables in the salon are showpiece items, built as a gift to NAI'A by the Fijian carpenters who refinished the ship. Made of alternating planks of the four native timbers used elsewhere throughout the ship, the tables are polished to a high sheen. Wokring on clunky camera repairs upon the dining room table is grounds for immediate keel-hauling, the skipper says (with an exceptionally serious wink)!
DELICIOUS SOUTH PACIFIC CUISINE !
The galley is on the main deck aft of the salon & there Manasa the Master Chef works his culinary magic. Word to the wise: a charter on NAI'A is not the time to start a serious diet. It’s a really good thing the meals are healthfully prepared, because most people eat more than they would if their will-power were better. We serve a cold breakfast of toast & cereal at sunrise, a full breakfast after the first dive, lunch after the second dive, snacks after the third dive, & a white-tablecloth & complementary wine dinner after the dusk dive. Coffee, tea, water, & juice are available 24 hours a day. Manasa has been with NAI'A since the beginning, despite being headhunted by the other live-aboards & several of Fiji's better resorts. Day after day, Manasa serves up a wide variety of meals, all utilizing locally grown produce & meat. The NAI'A crew catches fresh fish with regularity, & the vessel’s fresh fish barbecue is something to write home to Mom about, truly. A respected New Zealand publisher is now working on a NAI'A cookbook which features Manasa's inspiring recipes alongside underwater photographs.
DIVE DECKS:
The dive deck on NAI'A is unconventional in several respects. First, it is huge, bridging the entire 30-foot beam of the ship, & it is located amidships -- comfortably removed from the clutter of the working deck aft. During the charter, the crew take care of filling the tanks & loading gear into the skiffs from the aft dive platform, while divers have the uncluttered dive deck forward in which to suit up & listen to the very thorough dive briefings. Only masks, fins, & camera gear are stored forward, while the heavy & unwieldy tanks & BCs remain aft. Divers returning to the dive deck are treated to hot deck showers & clean dry towels at the end of every dive. NAI'A has a small laundry aboard where towels & tablecloths are washed daily.
RELAXATION AREAS of VESSEL:
Once the scuba tanks have been moved aft at the start of the charter, the dive deck cushions come out & the place becomes a lounging area sheltered from the mid-day sun. For those who want to be outside in the sun, the whole roof area over the dive deck & the camera room is a sundeck open to undiluted rays. During long passages the sundeck is used to carry NAI'A's two rigid inflatable skiffs. The pulpit over NAI'A's bow is another great place to lounge. Roomy enough for six to sit, a dozen thoroughly excited people can stand there watching bow-riding dolphins zip along playfully. Talk about a visual treat that’s tough to forget ! This is the Fiji live-aboard by which all others are, & will be, measured.
PERSONAL MESSAGE from NAI'A CAPT. ROB BARREL:
NAI'A is owned & managed by myself, Rob Barrel, & my sister Alexx Edwards & her husband Todd Edwards. Alexx & I grew up in Kailua, Oahu of Hawaii, where we learned to dive, sail, & windsurf before attending college on the mainland. After two years on the pre-law track at Harvard, a serendipitous confluence of coincidence led me to take a one year leave-of-absence to sail around the world. I didn't make it past the South Pacific, & the one year leave stretched into eleven years as better & better sailing opportunities kept coming along.
I finally returned to college in 1988, this time at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I studied dolphin behavior with Dr. Ken Norris. Although my return to college was interrupted by several 6-month yacht deliveries, I eventually graduated with highest honors in anthropology. NAI'A was conceived as part of my graduation thesis: the ideal floating laboratory from which to apply anthropological tools to observe & come to understand a community of wild dolphins. There are many elements involved in making the dream come true, only two of which are a University degree & a 120-foot ship. But those two are a significant start & the project is slowly evolving. I hope some day to know a family of dolphins as well as Jane Goodall knows the chimps at Gombe.
Meanwhile my sister Alexx met Todd, married, started a family, & they built their home on an island in a lake in the middle of nowhere in Florida. Perfectly suited for life in a third-world country, Todd & Alexx came to Fiji shortly after NAI'A did to help rebuild the boat. They have been running the office & the shoreside support for NAI'A ever since.
The fourth key member of the NAI'A home team is Cat Holloway. Cat learned to dive in Papua New Guinea when she was 17 & she has been working in or around the dive industry ever since, most recently as editor of the Australian magazine, Scuba Diver. Cat came to Fiji several years ago to write about NAI'A & the Fiji experience & was so taken with it all that she never returned. (Beware: this magic happens to a lot of people! ) She runs the diving aboard NAI'A & tries, in the few days between charters, to write the occasional magazine article.
U.S. DIVE TRAVEL's ENDORSEMENT: The core of the NAIA family is her Fijian crew, eleven of the friendliest & most able sailors anywhere. Most have been with the ship since the beginning, & there is every indication that ship & crew will all grow old together. Fijians are among the friendliest people on earth, so it is no wonder that NAIA's clients consistently rate the crew as the very best in the business. There simply is no ship like NAI’A in the live-aboard diving world. The Barrel family knows dive vacations like the makers of Godiva chocolates know their trades. We invite you to join us. We would all be honored to serve you with an adventure-diving experience that will be a splendid memory for the rest of your life. Nai'a dive packages are vacations that change divers profoundly, for the better -- always.
All Nai'a photos © Copyright Nai'a Fiji.