Last Updated on October 8, 2026 by Jeff Tomas
I’ve run longtail boat trips out of Chiang Saen, Chiang Rai since 2004, mostly the hour up to the Golden Triangle and back, and on good days the long run down to Chiang Khong. My father worked the same stretch of river before me, and he taught me to read it by the color of the water and the shape of the ripples behind a hidden rock. I’m fifty-three.
Until this year, the most open water I’d ever crossed was the ferry to Koh Tao in 2019, where my daughter Ploy talked me into a diving course I nearly walked out of on the first morning. In March 2026, she talked me into something much bigger.
She booked us both onto a boat in Raja Ampat, at the far eastern end of Indonesia, and only told me what it cost once the deposit was paid.
Raja Ampat is roughly 1,500 islands off the tip of Papua, and there’s almost nothing built on them. The reefs are spread across so much open water that you can’t reach the good ones from a single hotel, so visitors live on wooden boats that move between sites at night.
Planning around tide windows, remote anchorages, and long inter-island passages makes Neptuneliveaboards.com a useful reference for understanding Raja Ampat diving liveaboard logistics, where geography often dictates the shape of the itinerary. Our boat carried twelve guests and a crew of fifteen, and every evening the cruise director wrote the next day’s tide times in red marker on a whiteboard beside the dining table.
Reading Water for a Living
On the Mekong, the water tells you most of what you need to know. It rises in the rainy season and drops in the dry, and since the dams went in upstream, it also rises and falls on days when no rain has fallen at all, which still annoys me. I know where the sandbars shift to in February. I can tell which eddy below Sop Ruak will spin a longtail if you take it too slowly.
The sea doesn’t work like that, and I was wrong to assume it would. In Raja Ampat,t the tide comes in and goes out twice a day, and the current between two islands can run faster than the Mekong in flood, then go almost still for half an hour at slack water.
Everything on a Raja Ampat liveaboard is planned around those half hours. Divers want to get in when the current is gentle, so the boat has to be at the right reef at the right moment, and the overnight passage is worked out backward from there.
The Morning I Slept Through the Tide
On the third day, a Wednesday, I made the mistake I’m still embarrassed about. I’d looked at the whiteboard the night before and seen the first dive at Blue Magic marked for 6.10 am, but I’d also seen high tide written further down at 9.40 am, and I decided, in the confident way of a man who has read rivers for thirty years, that the early time must be an error. I told Ploy we’d have plenty of time. I set my alarm for 7.30 am.
When I came up on deck at 7.35 am, the tender was already on its way back, and Ploy climbed out with her mask pushed up and told me, without much sympathy, that she’d just watched two manta rays circle a cleaning station for twenty minutes.
Over breakfast the guide, a man from Sorong named Dorus, explained that the dive was timed to the turn of the current, which on that reef comes well before high tide. He drew it for me on a paper napkin with a biro. I’ve still got the napkin in my wallet.
For the rest of the week I set two alarms and asked Dorus to explain each morning’s timing before I went to bed.
What the Passages Changed
The boat moved almost every night. Some passages took two hours, and one, south towards Misool, was closer to eleven, through water that rolled enough to wake me twice.
- Anchorages were chosen for shelter from the evening wind
- Dive times shifted by up to an hour from one day to the next
- On two nights the captain changed the plan after dinner, because the swell forecast had moved and the reef he’d picked would have been too rough by morning.
Under the Water
I’m not a strong diver. I’d done 31 dives before this trip, all of them in Thailand, and I’d assumed the photographs of Raja Ampat were taken on the best day of the best year. But Raja Ampat scuba diving was more than I’d been ready for. At Cape Kri, the fish were so thick that I lost sight of Ploy twice from about two meters away, and the coral underneath them carried on further than my torch could reach.
- There were turtles on most dives, and one slept under a table coral through our whole safety stop because nothing we did seemed to bother it.
- A wobbegong shark lay across a rock like a rug left out to dry
A Short Digression About Catfish
My grandfather caught a Mekong giant catfish near Chiang Khong in 1978, a fish he always claimed weighed 241 kilos, though nobody in the family ever saw a scale. Those fish are almost gone from the river now. I thought about him on the boat more than I expected to, mostly because the crew kept pointing out fish bigger than anything I’ve pulled from the Mekong, with the same pride he used to have.
Raja Ampat or Komodo From Northern Thailand
Ploy nearly booked a Komodo island liveaboard instead. The flights are simpler, through Bali to Labuan Bajo, and the main season there runs through the middle of the year. But Komodo is known for stronger currents, and with my 31 dives she decided Raja Ampat in March was the gentler choice.
From Chiang Rai we flew to Don Mueang and on to Jakarta, where we slept a night near the airport. The 5.20 am flight to Sorong the next morning got us to the boat about 26 hours after we’d locked the front door. Our cabin came to 87,650 baht each for eight nights, including meals, diving, nitrox, and the marine park permit.
For anyone in the north weighing up Raja Ampat diving for the first time, a few practical points.
- Foreigners on long-stay visas should sort a re-entry permit at Chiang Rai immigration before flying.
- Book at least eight months ahead
- Carry a printed copy of your dive insurance
- Ask the boat which route it runs on your dates, because the northern and southern itineraries cover different reefs and the passages between them can be long.
- Pack two alarms
Back on the River
I’m back on the Mekong now, and the water is still high after the recent floods. Last Sunday I took a family from Lyon up to Sop Ruak and caught myself checking the time against the current, the way Dorus showed me, even though it makes little sense on a river. I haven’t decided yet whether it’s a useful habit or one I should drop before the high season starts in November.
Trending News:
Bangkok Floods: Thailand Airport Status, Travel & Road Updates
Phuket’s Holiday Rental Boom: What Is Driving It, and What It Means for Travellers
