Beqa is a great island. We were staying at the Beqa Lagoon Resort in a garden bure. Very nice, very far from the sterile confort of a standard hotel. The stay there was amazing. The food was unbelievable for the place, especially the huge variety of desserts! The crowd was very nice, although I would recommend that before you book you check if they are almost sold out to only one or two big groups as that really reduces the interaction you can have with others. On our last two nights, everybody we met had left and were replaced by two groups of people and we ended up kind of isolated, having breakfast lunch and dinner with the owners...

The diving was good. I was a little disapointed by the visibility. We had no more than 30ft most of the time. According to the owners, the best time to come to Beqa is April or October as the sea, though less calm, is clearer. In December, it was as flat as Lake Laguna, but the viz was degraded. The normal  (i.e. non-shark) dives are very nice though, with a lot of colorful soft coral and abundant life. Millions of clown fish populate an equivalent number of big anemones. Leaf fish, Lion fish, morays, blue ruban eels, shrimps, nudis, all kind of stuff are to be found. And sharks. But for the best shark diving, you need to go to the Bistro...

The bistro is an underwater arena where Beqa Adventure Divers feed the local sharks. Contrary to Stuart Cove in the Bahamas that feed 5ft reef sharks with fish on a stick, the sharks at the bistro are big badass bulls, greys, lemons and if you're lucky a couple of tigers (we were not lucky on our trip, but we came back un-eaten), hand fed by local divers. The very nice thing too is that if you show up with a big huge camera like my video, they will place you on a spot far from the crowd where you can get good footage of the feeding process. That's also a big difference with Stuart Cove who seem to be more interested in taking pictures that they can sell you a fortune later than really let you shoot your own. I really disliked that commercial push in the Bahamas, I never felt it in Fiji.

The viz at the Bistro was terrible. It becomes really bad when fish parts start flying around when the big boys start feeding. It also attracts a lot of by-standers that feed on left-over. You'll see sometimes the camera had hard-time focusing on the sharks with the constant ballet of reef fish around them.

We loved it so much that we did it 4 times! We even went into deco on one of the dive (the bistro is at about 90ft on its deepest part). And the deco stop were hilarious with tens of divers hanging on one line (there was up to three boats at the stop, that's about 40 divers) and all the sharks swimming below, probably still hungry...

I shot about 2 hours of video on 4 dives. The edited video is about 15 minutes and also contains a few minutes of footage of the sharks and baracudas of the Blyth Straits that I shot on the second part of the trip when we spent New Year in Wananavu in the north-eastern part of Viti Levu. Although the source was AVCHD 1080i, I made a DVD out of it, so the final version is only 480p.

After the first dives, I was able to play the video at the resort TV (I had brought my composite cable) and it looked really, really, really green. Another videographer then told me that I should do my manual balance. I told him I couldn't with my Top Dawg, so he advised me to set the white balance to "outdoor" instead of "auto". I did that and the result on the second set of dives was better. It still needed some serious color correction in post-processing but it was a little less green and little more contrasted. The final result is an assembly of more than 50 short clips. Enjoy!

Check out our photo gallery for a few stills I took in between my videos when my gee-I-wish-that-bloody-video-housing-would-be-less-bulky became to overwhelming and I decided to take my good old point-and-shoot instead. I also try with both the video *and* the still camera at the same time and it happens to be not really wise, so kids, don't do it.