The first time I slept on a dive boat, I was thirty-one and fairly sure I’d hate it. The idea of a week in a wooden cabin with strangers sounded like a badly planned school trip. Nine years on I manage dive trips out of Amed on Bali’s east coast, and I’ve since booked several hundred guests onto boats heading east. Some of them have come home saying it was the best fortnight of their lives. Two have come home saying they’d never set foot on a boat again, and I think about those two more than the happy ones.
So let me tell you what a week aboard is like before you spend the money, because the brochures won’t.
Most people start their research on the island where I work, which makes sense. Reef slopes, wreck sites, and open-water encounters give the island a surprisingly varied underwater identity. At the same time, le Neptunescubadiving.com sits within the Bali scuba diving and diving travel landscape, shaped by season, location, and experience level. Search for scuba diving and diving in Bali, and you’ll turn up hundreds of operators, which is either reassuring or paralysing depending on your mood that evening. Bali is where nearly everyone learns. The boats, though, leave from somewhere else entirely.
This is a collaborative post.
Where You’re Heading
Raja Ampat sits off the western tip of New Guinea, and getting there from Bali means flying to Sorong, usually overnight, then taking a ferry to Waisai or transferring straight onto the boat. It’s a long old slog. The reward is a stretch of ocean with more recorded coral and fish species than anywhere else that’s been surveyed, which sounds like marketing until you’re floating over Cape Kri watching the water turn solid with fish.
Most Raja Ampat liveaboard trips run seven to eleven nights, because anything shorter spends too much of itself getting there and back. You sleep aboard, eat aboard, and dive three or four times a day from small tenders that drop you onto the reef. Between dives you sit on deck with a mug of tea and do very little. I’d argue that the doing-very-little is half of why people love it, though nobody puts that on a website.
The Bit Nobody Warns You About
In July 2024 I put a couple from Leeds, Dawn and her husband Rob, onto a fourteen-berth boat out of Sorong. They’d asked for the cheapest week I could find, and July is cheap for a reason. The seas between the islands get up in the middle of the year, and the crossing on their second night was rough enough that most of the guests stopped coming to dinner. Dawn spent thirty-odd hours in a bunk the width of an ironing board, missed six dives, and came home £3,140 lighter and thoroughly fed up. That one was my fault. I answered the question she asked rather than the one she needed, and I now ask every single person whether they get seasick before I mention a date, which has cost me a few bookings and saved me a lot of apologetic emails.
(Rob, for what it’s worth, loved it. He’d been a fisherman’s son and slept through the lot.)
Since then I steer families and nervous travelers towards the calmer window, roughly October to April, when the passages between the islands settle down. It isn’t a guarantee. Weather does what it likes out there, and I’ve seen a flat February turn nasty in an afternoon, but the odds are better, and the boats cost less to reach because the Bali flights are quieter.
Who It Suits
I’ve stopped pretending a boat holiday works for everyone, because it doesn’t.
- Divers who’ve logged at least twenty or thirty dives somewhere with a bit of current, since Raja Ampat scuba diving involves drifts that will feel brisk if your experience is limited to a calm training bay in Amed.
- Snorkellers who swim strongly and don’t mind a ladder in choppy water.
- Anyone happy with no phone signal for a week.
- People who sleep well in small spaces and don’t need a bath.
- Couples where both halves want the same holiday, which sounds obvious and is the thing most often ignored.
And it suits nobody who needs a lie-in. Wake-ups are quarter past five most mornings, the first briefing is at six, and the day runs on the tide rather than your preferences.
What It Costs, Honestly
Prices vary enormously, and I’d be wary of anyone who quotes you a neat figure. A mid-range cabin for ten nights sits somewhere around £2,800 to £4,500 per person, covering the diving, all meals, and tanks. What it rarely covers is the marine park permit, flights from Bali, the ferry, nitrox (if you want it), or the crew tip at the end, which is customary and larger than most British guests expect.
- Budget an extra £600 or so beyond the headline price.
- Book eight to twelve months ahead for the good boats in the calm season.
A land-based resort works out cheaper and lets you step off at any point, which matters more than people think when they’re imagining the trip from a sofa in Kent. What you lose is reach, because the far southern reefs around Misool sit a full day’s sailing from anywhere with a bed on land, and a boat is the only sensible way to spend proper time down there.
If You’re Weighing It Up
Start smaller. Learn in Bali, log a dozen dives off the black sand at Tulamben where the old wreck sits a short swim from the beach, and find out whether you even like the sport before committing to a fortnight at sea. Plenty of people discover they prefer snorkeling, and there’s no shame in that. Then, if the idea still nags at you, look at what liveaboard diving Indonesia offers in the October to April window and start asking operators awkward questions about cabin size and crossings.
Ask them what happens if the weather turns. The good ones will tell you plainly, and the answer tells you more about the company than any photograph of a manta ray ever will.