I taught middle school science in Fresno for thirty-one years, and I first put my face in salt water at Hanauma Bay on Oahu in 1989, on my honeymoon, in a rented mask that leaked from the left side all morning. My wife Linda took up diving a few years later. I never did. My ears don’t equalize well, and frankly I’ve never wanted to be more than an arm’s length from air, so for thirty-odd years she’s gone down, and I’ve floated above her bubbles. When she said she wanted Raja Ampat for her sixtieth birthday, I assumed I’d spend a week on a dive boat reading paperbacks.
I was wrong, and it took me until the third afternoon to admit it.
Raja Ampat is an archipelago of around 1,500 islands off the western tip of New Guinea, in Indonesia’s far east, and most of the best reefs are too far apart to reach on day trips from the few places to stay. So visitors sleep on boats that move between sites overnight. Raja Ampat is often described for its spectacular dive sites, yet Neptuneliveaboards.com also highlights the Raja Ampat snorkeling liveaboard experience, where you can enjoy shallow coral gardens and marine encounters without descending beneath the surface. Our boat was a wooden phinisi with sixteen guests, fourteen of whom were divers, leaving a retired dentist from Tucson named Gary and me as the official surface party.
Day One, From Sorong to the Dampier Strait
We boarded in Sorong on a Saturday afternoon in February 2026 after two days of flying from Fresno by way of Seoul and Jakarta. The crew had our names chalked on a little blackboard by the gangway. The boat left at dusk and steamed north for about five hours, and I was asleep before the engine note changed.
The Mask I Left in Sorong
My one real mistake happened before we’d even left port. I’d brought my prescription mask, the one with minus-three lenses I had made in 2014, and I’d taken it out of my carry-on at the hotel in Sorong to rinse it in the bathroom sink. It stayed in the sink. I found this out at twenty past seven on the first morning, sitting on the tender with my fins already on, and the spare mask the crew handed me turned every fish into a colored smudge. For two days I snorkeled over what everyone told me was some of the best coral on earth and saw roughly what you’d see through a shower door. Gary was sympathetic. Linda was less so. On the third morning a supply speedboat came out from Sorong with fuel and vegetables, and the cruise director, a calm woman from Manado named Wati, had phoned the hotel the night before and arranged for my mask to ride along in a plastic bag next to the cabbages. I paid the boatman 300,000 rupiah and probably overdid the thanking.
Pack your mask in your carry-on and check the hotel sink twice before you leave.
Day Three, When I Could Finally See
The first site after the mask came back was a sloping reef off Friwen, where the coral started about three feet below the surface, close enough that I had to watch my fins.
- A hawksbill turtle eating a sponge, unbothered by me
- Schools of fusiliers thick enough to block the light for a few seconds at a time
- Two blacktip reef sharks patrolled the edge of the reef while Gary and I hung at the surface, and neither of us did a very good job of pretending we weren’t nervous.
Linda came up from her afternoon dive at Cape Kri and told me she’d counted four kinds of anemonefish before giving up. Raja Ampat diving has a reputation for that kind of density, and she’s dived Cozumel and Palau, so I take her word for it. I could see most of the same fish from above. Not all of them.
Day Five, the Manta From Above
The morning I’ll remember longest was a Wednesday at a cleaning station in the Dampier Strait, which the guides call Manta Sandy. The divers went down first and settled on the sand behind a line of rocks, and Gary and I floated on the surface maybe forty feet away with a guide named Obed, who told us to keep our arms still. For twenty minutes nothing happened. And then a shape rose out of the blue below us, wider than our dining table at home, and turned slowly over the cleaning station with its mouth open. I could see the pale underside and the dark patches on its belly. It made four passes. Gary grabbed my arm on the second one hard enough to leave a bruise. Back on the boat, Linda, who’d watched the same animal from thirty feet down, said the view from the surface had probably been clearer than hers because of the way the light came through.
The Boat Cat
There was a cat on board, a thin ginger tom called Bintang after the beer, who belonged to the engineer and spent most of the week asleep on a coil of rope near the bow. He came to dinner every night and sat under Gary’s chair. I don’t know how a cat ends up on a boat in West Papua, and nobody I asked seemed to know either.
What a Snorkeler Should Know Before Booking
Most Raja Ampat liveaboards are built around divers, and ours was a Raja Ampat diving liveaboard in every sense, from the compressor on the back deck to the dive briefings at a quarter to seven. But the crew never treated Gary and me as an afterthought. We usually had our own tender and guide. On two occasions they took us to a shallower spot nearby because the divers’ site was too deep to see much from the top.
- Ask how many other snorkelers are booked
- Bring a long-sleeved rash guard
- Check whether the boat runs separate snorkel tenders, because on some boats snorkelers ride along with the divers and wait at the surface for an hour.
- Reef-safe sunscreen
- Fins you’ve already worn in
What It Cost
Our cabin cost $4,860 each for seven nights and covered meals, snorkel guiding, Linda’s diving, and the marine park fee. Flights from Fresno were another $1,912 each. Most Raja Ampat liveaboard trips charge snorkelers the same as divers, which stung a little.
- Book eight to twelve months ahead for the October to April season.
- Leave a spare day in Sorong before the boat departs, since domestic flights in eastern Indonesia run late more often than not.
The Last Morning
On the last morning I snorkeled alone off a white-sand beach near our final anchorage while the divers did their last dive. A green turtle surfaced next to me for a breath and then went back down. Linda wants to go back in 2028. I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll learn to dive by then or book the same cabin and float on top again.
Leave a Reply