When we took the boat out in Fiji to visit the nearby islands, I noticed something that seemed very unintuitive. At least, to what I thought were boating rules.

The top picture is when we were going to the islands (in fact you can see one of our destination islands in the picture). We had just left the main dock. We were cruising out of the main area thru the channel that put us in the ocean.

Notice the nearby boat on our port side. And now notice the markers denoting the edge of the channel. Why is it green in color? Should it not be red? The rule is Red-Right-Return right?

The lower picture is from the same channel when we were returning. Note that the red markers were on our left side. Those should be green right?

Does anybody know what is happening here?