A Non-Diver's Day on a Raja Ampat Dive Cruise

Fourteen operator websites we surveyed publish nothing at all about what a non-diver does on their boat. Two publish the phrase "non-diver friendly" and stop. A handful list activities. One is honest enough to say it does not mix divers and snorkellers on the same cruise at all.

So if you are the person who does not dive, deciding whether to spend eleven nights on a boat built around diving, the internet has almost nothing for you. Here is the version with hours in it.

The shape of the day

A dive boat's day is a schedule, and the schedule is not negotiable because tank fills, surface intervals and boat movements all depend on it.

A typical day runs something like: early dive before breakfast, second dive mid-morning, third in the afternoon, and on some boats a night dive after dinner. Between them the boat either sits at anchor or on a mooring, or moves to the next site.

Each dive costs more time than the dive. Kitting up, the tender ride, sixty minutes down, the ride back, and getting six people and their gear back aboard. Call it ninety minutes from the moment the group starts moving to the moment the deck is quiet again. Three dives a day means roughly four and a half hours where the boat's attention is elsewhere.

That is the number nobody publishes, and it is the number you actually need.

What those hours are really like

Here is the part that decides your trip: for most of that time, the boat is sitting still on a reef.

That is not a bad place to be. The reef the divers went to see usually starts a few metres below the surface, and in Raja Ampat the shallow tops are among the best parts of it. Coral cover here is dense at snorkelling depth in a way it is not in most of the world. At a jetty site you are looking at essentially the same thing the divers are, from four metres instead of eighteen.

So a good chunk of those ninety-minute blocks is time you can spend in the water if you want it. The rest is a book, a camera, the top deck and, on a well-run boat, a crew member who is not on dive duty and can put you in the water somewhere.

The honest bit: it is still their schedule. You go where the diving is good, you stay as long as the diving takes, and you leave when the diving is done. If the site is a pinnacle in open water where the interest sits at thirty metres, you will spend that block looking at blue water, and no amount of goodwill from the crew changes the geography.

The tender question, which is the whole thing

Ask one question of any operator and make it this one: while the divers are down, is a tender free to take me somewhere else?

A boat carrying two tenders that both go to the dive site has no answer for you. A boat with a spare tender and crew to run it can drop you on a beach, in a mangrove channel, at a village, or on a shallow reef around the corner, and collect you when the dive ends.

It is also why a private charter changes this problem completely. On a chartered boat there is no competition for the tender, because the group decides. If your party has divers and non-divers in it, that is worth more than any amount of cabin upgrade, and we go through the economics in taking the whole boat rather than cabins.

Which sites actually work for you

This is knowable in advance and almost nobody tells you, so here is the pattern.

Jetty sites are the best days you will have. Shallow, sheltered, and busy with life that lives around the pilings. Schooling fish, giant clams, turtles on some of them. One operator describes snorkelling directly from a jetty here as extraordinary, and the depth ranges published for these sites start at two to four metres. You and the divers are looking at the same thing.

Manta cleaning stations can be genuinely great. The best-known shallow one sits in five to twenty metres of water depending on whose figures you read, with modest current, and operators describe it as open to snorkellers as well as divers. That is a manta encounter without a tank. Bear in mind sources disagree on the depths, and there is a claim in circulation that a daily limit on divers applies there which we have not been able to confirm with any authority.

Shallow reef gardens are good. Sites described as sloping from five metres to a sandy bottom at twenty-five give you a real reef at the top.

Pinnacles and drift sites in open water are not for you. The structure starts below snorkelling depth, the current is the reason the divers are there, and there is nothing at the surface. On those mornings, take the tender elsewhere or take the morning off.

Our dive-site pages say which is which, and the Arborek jetty page and the Manta Sandy page are the two to start with.

Crossing days

On a longer route some days are passage. The boat runs for hours, often overnight, and nobody dives.

For divers those are rest days and mildly frustrating. For a non-diver they are, honestly, the easiest days of the trip. Nobody is anywhere else, the deck is full, and the boat is doing the one thing everybody aboard is doing together.

If you are prone to motion sickness, though, crossing days are also the hardest ones physically, and that deserves its own thought before you book anything.

The honest recommendation

If nobody in your party dives, do not book a dive boat. Book a leisure cruise. It costs less, it goes to the places that are good above water as well as below, and its whole day is built around what you actually came for. Ours is a ten-night leisure cruise through the villages and the north, and the choice between the two formats is set out in choosing a dive boat or a leisure cruise.

If your partner dives and you do not, and you want to travel together, a dive boat can work well, on three conditions. The boat has a spare tender. You are happy in the water with a mask. And you have both accepted, out loud and before booking, that the schedule belongs to the diving.

If you are not a swimmer and not a water person at all, be careful. A dive liveaboard is a small vessel a long way from land, organised entirely around an activity you are not doing. Some people find that peaceful. Others find it eleven nights long. A resort with a beach is a kinder answer and we would rather say so now.

The reason we can be blunt about this is that we sell both. If a dive boat is the wrong product for you, the right one is on the same website, and we would rather move you to it than have you spend a week wishing you were somewhere else. What the diving day looks like from the other side is in a day aboard a Raja Ampat cruise.