half at risk | 10 nights | from $5,960 per person
Raja Ampat Vacation Package, Half At Risk
This Raja Ampat vacation package runs ten nights and lives or dies on the sea. Fourteen dives are planned; a bad run of swell leaves you with six or seven, and nothing recovers the rest.
What half at risk means here
- What the weather can cancel
- The diving itself. Swell over about 1.5 meters closes the exposed channels off the outer islands, and heavy runoff after a wet night drops visibility from 25 meters to under 10. The drift sites and the cleaning stations are the first things to go.
- How often it actually happens
- Between late October and April, rain falls on 14 to 18 days in a typical month and wind pushes past 20 knots on two or three of them. In a ten-night stay that costs one to three diving days for most people. Roughly one trip in five loses five days or more, which is where half the dive count disappears.
- What you do instead
- The sheltered inner passages stay divable in almost anything, but they are shallow, silty and not the reason anyone flies here. When the boat cannot move at all, the day becomes a village walk, a mangrove channel by kayak and a long afternoon at anchor. Lost dives are not added back later in the week.
- What money comes back
- None. The boat is paid for by the day, not by the dive, and days lost to sea state are not refunded by the operator or by us. Travel insurance is not something we arrange, and we do not name anyone who sells it.
- Who should not book this
- Do not book this if the ten nights only make sense with 20 dives logged. Do not book it as your first current diving either: the sites that stay open in poor weather still run 1 to 2 knots, and that is a hard place to be ten dives past certification.
The fourth row is the one this trade prints smallest, and on most of these trips it says nothing comes back. It stands above the price deliberately.
What the $5,960 pays for
- Ten nights aboard a small live-aboard, twin share, working the northern and central island groups
- Up to four dives a day, 14 planned across the ten nights, with tanks, weights and nitrox for certified divers
- Two days are left with no site fixed, so the boat can move to whatever water is workable that morning instead of holding to a printed plan
- All meals on board, drinking water, tea and coffee
- The marine park user fee for the archipelago, one payment covering the full stay
- Small boat transfer from the regional airport to the harbor and back, both ends
- A guide in the water on every dive, working with four divers at a time
What sits outside that number
- Getting to Indonesia. International flights are priced on their own and ticketed in your name
- Full equipment rental if you travel without your own, about $35 a day
- Certification and specialty courses run on board, from $290
- Crew gratuities, which run $150 to $250 per person over ten nights
- A night ashore at either end when flight timings force one, from $95 per room
- Travel insurance is not arranged here, and we do not point you at anyone who sells it
What it costs
from $5,960 per person
- Covering
- 10 nights, ten nights of boat-based diving across a remote island archipelago.
- Taken as read
- A room shared between two, except where any of the six otherwise for your case.
- What lifts it
- A crowded month, a better room, a decision left late, and every hour you hand to somebody else to arrange.
- When it stops moving
- The moment an operator signs its own name under it. Before that, read it as the floor of a spread this desk has actually seen.
You settle with the operator, through whatever system they run. Not a cent of it passes through here, and this office never sees a card.
Months that hold and months that do not
This Raja Ampat vacation package runs between late October and April. Rain falls on 14 to 18 days in a typical month through that window, usually hard and after dark, and that alone changes very little underwater. Wind is the variable that counts. Swell over about 1.5 meters shuts the exposed channels on the outer islands, and that arrives on two or three days in an average month.
July and August we do not sell at all. The southeast wind holds for weeks at a stretch, crossings between island groups turn long and wet, and the southern sites are closed more often than they are open. Mid December into early January is the other run we would argue you out of: monthly rain climbs past 300 mm, runoff from the larger islands pulls visibility from 25 meters down to 8 or 10, and the wide angle photography people come here for stops working.
Late February through April is the steadiest stretch we see. Water sits near 29 C, surface conditions settle, and the cleaning stations stay active across the whole period.
Still open when we write it up
Nothing below is decided until the booking is confirmed: which island group the boat starts from, since that decides whether the first three days face north or south; cabin deck, which is a $340 difference per person across the ten nights; how many night dives are written into the schedule; and whether the two unfixed days stay unfixed or get spent on specific sites you already have in mind.