HISTORY
LOCAL COUPLE MAKE GOOD
It was new. It was exciting. It was informative and very enjoyable. It was Fiji’s own glass bottom boat cruise and it was good enough to make the mermaids sing "OOlooloo" and thus the cruise became known as the Oolooloo cruise even though the company was registered as Storck Cruises. Storck Cruises was started in the 1960s by one of Fiji’s oldest E
uropean families, Vincent and Bessie Storck. Vincent was a direct descendent of Jacob Storck who was sent to Fiji in the 1860s to conduct a botanical review of Fiji’s potential for horticulture, silviculture and agriculture. Falling in love with Fiji, Jacob stayed and in the due course became a principal contributor to a book on Fiji’s botany. Storck Cruises became a "must do" for visitors to Fiji, especially those on the large cruise ships, which called on a regular basis. The business prospered because it as interesting and affordable, while Vincent piloted the boat, Bessie became a celebrity in her own right as she slipped into the water and ran an informative live commentary about the amazing diversity of life on Fiji’s reefs and ocean, her Banana cake recipe was also famous and the Bessie Banana Cake was found in many Fiji cook books. The demand for Storck Cruises saw Vincent and Bessie expand their fleet to five boats in Suva. In late 2009 the wheel turned full circle. Vincent and Bessie’s son Max and his wife Dot designed and built the ‘Oolala’ in Nadi which now cruises daily to the Island of Savala.
