Raja Ampat 2026

After like 15+ years of wanting to go to Raja Ampat, the stars finally aligned and we actually made it happen.  We went on the Pindito liveaboard, which Clinton had been on twice before.  It was nominally a 12 day trip, but there were 10 days of diving.  The diving was outstanding and definitely did not disappoint.  There was a lot of variety both in terms of the kinds of dive sites and also the marine life.  So many fish, and so many different kinds of fish.  The crew also does a good job of coming up with other little non-diving excursions throughout the trip, to add some variety -- like short hikes, beach visits, zodiac tours, etc.

The Pindito was supposedly the first dive liveaboard in Indonesia.  There are now a zillon dive liveaboards in Indonesia, many of them in Raja Ampat this time of year.  There a no doubt much nicer/more luxurious liveaboards there now, but the Pindito definitely knows the area and sites very well.  Several of the DMs in particular were really good.  I'm guessing this is more important in less-dived areas than Raja Ampat though.

Alright, here are the day-by-day reports:

Day 0: Boarding the Pindito

Day 1: Wayil

Day 2: Pele/Wayil

Day 3: Boo/Fiabacet

Day 4: Warakaraket/Jiliet

Day 5: Fiabacet/Tomolol

Day 6: Penemu

Day 7: Yangeffo/Gam

Day 8: Mansuar

Day 9: Mansuar/Batanta

Day 10: Jerif

Day 10: Jerif

We did two dives at Manta Way.  Both dives had good manta activity once we found the right area.  On the first dive, things really picked up near the end, and we were still watching the dancing mantas from the surface at the end of the dive.  I didn’t want to leave!

On the second dive, we ended up at a cleaning station by ourselves with two mantas for about 40 minutes, which was probably the best manta encounter of the trip.  After hearing dive after dive that we might see mantas on this or that site, we finally had a really really great manta encounter to cap off the trip.  This was by far the best manta encounter I’ve ever had, not because there were so many of them, but because we had a nice long peaceful encounter where we got to watch the manta ballet.

Both dives ended more or less when we were low on gas.  I think the second dive was like 80 or 90 minutes long, and Clinton and I were both hanging out kind of shallow for a while to drag things out as long as we could!  So while this description of the two dives is short and not very exciting, the dives themselves were long and filled with awesome manta watching!  I have tons of video footage, which of course I haven't processed yet, and I probably won't find time to do it until I retire :P

After diving, we started the trip back to Sorong.  That evening, there was a feast with Indonesian food, and then some music from the crew.  The food was delicious and the music was fun.

Day 9: Mansuar/Batanta

The first dive was back at the jetty. There were more turtles, although not as many large ones as the previous day.  But I think Rob managed to get some good turtle-in-blue-water shots of one of the not-huge turtles.  He also managed a great shot of the giant sweetlips under the jetty.

There were some fairly strange divers around the site, which made things a bit more chaotic than necessary.  But this did provide for some entertainment.  At some point late in the dive when we were back up near the jetty, we saw a diver swim by, carrying his BC and tank under him.  Like he had his entire rig but instead of wearing it, he had his arms wrapped around it.  Then we saw a second diver doing this!  I guess it’s a trend.  I’m sure all of the sidemount rebreather divers in Florida will be sporting this new configuration any day now.

The second dive was at Manta Way. We saw one or two passes by a manta at a cleaning station, and then things were quiet for a while.  After that, we did a long, fairly fast swim to another area, which was a bit tiring, and did see another manta, although it didn’t stick around very long.

There was also a good wobbegong sighting nearby, and we got to see it swim briefly.  This might have been the highlight of the dive.

Both the third dive and the night dive were at Yellow Coconut, which is a muck site, and it was very good.  I was very excited to do a muck dive, since we had been talking about the fact that we’d kind of seen all kinds of different sites on this trip *except* for a muck dive.  And I love muck diving.

Between the two dives, we saw a blue-ring octopus, several other small octopuses, a red cuttlefish, bobtail squids, costasiella slugs – that’s “shawn the sheep” (and lots of those little green leaves without the slugs), and a number of other small slugs, along with a lot of small crabs and shrimp.

Clinton flooded a strobe on the night dive and had to end the dive early.  Luckily it was just a little bit of water in the strobe and it was recoverable.  But good that he noticed it right at the beginning and aborted the dive.

P.S. This post has two of my favorite photos from the trip.  I'll let you guess which ones they are...

Day 8: Mansuar

There was a morning birding outing planned, to go see the Red Bird of Paradise.  While the birds looked awesome, the idea of getting up at 5AM on vacation did not seem awesome, so I decided not to go.  In the end, the outing was canceled due to rain.  So I guess I made the right decision, because I got to sleep in and didn’t miss anything.

The original morning dive site had too much current, so we tried to go back to Mayhem, but there was a thunderstorm and that dive was also canceled.  The thunderstorm was sort of insane and scary.  It was like we were in reasonably calm waters and weather and then it was armageddon, and then it was back to normal not that much later.

So the first actual dive of the day ended up being at Manta Sandy.

This was a (potential) cleaning station, where there was a line of rocks that we were all supposed to hunker down behind.  It probably would have been good to add a couple more pounds of weight to my rig to make the laying-in-the-sand position more comfortable.  We saw a single manta go by probably three times. The looks were pretty good, but it was a bit far off for good photo or video.

There was also a sea moth (or dragonfish) in the sand, and a mantis shrimp hanging out basically right in front of where I was sitting to watch for mantas, which was a good distraction.  While we waited for a manta to show up and there was no action, I just watched the mantis shrimp popping out of his hole, scurrying around, and then scurrying back into the hole.

Toward the end of the dive, after we had mostly given up on mantas, we found a fairly large wobbegong out in the open.  Woot.

The second and third dives were at a jetty (Sawandarek). During the day dive, there were very large turtles and another large wobbegong.  The turtles were crazy big, like the biggest turtles I’ve ever seen.  There were also some less crazy-big turtles, including one that I managed to get some good footage of on the move in blue water.  Under the jetty, there were lots of fish, including various snappers and sweetlips.  There was one giant fish that looked like a sweetlips, which was apparently called a giant sweetlips.

The night dive was also at the jetty. There were various macro critters—nothing especially standout, but enough to keep things interesting.  There were a couple of nudibranchs, I think one of which was maybe the best nudi find of the trip – though I couldn’t really appreciate it at the time, since it was so tiny.  But Rob got a great picture of it that allowed me to declare it the best nudi find of the trip.

Day 7: Yangeffo/Gam

I missed the first dive, at a site called Mayhem, because I was sick, which was unfortunate since apparently there were a lot of wobbegong sharks.  I sort of suspect this might have been the best dive of the trip, but I’m pretending not to suspect this for obvious reasons.

The second dive was at Citrus Ridge. We saw three wobbegong sharks, a blacktip shark, and a small blue-spotted ray.  (After we saw all of these wobbegong sharks, the description of Mayhem was revised to make it seem like maybe they didn’t see quite as many wobbegong sharks as I originally thought.)

There was also a large school of small baitfish right at the start of the dive.  There was a decent amount of current in the middle of the dive, and then the shallow reef at the end was very nice. It felt like it would make a really good snorkel site.

The third dive was at Mangrove Ridge. There is a dive site there, but we effectively did the snorkel profile.  Right at the start there was a really nice school of yellowtail fusiliers. The mangroves themselves had cardinalfish, and there were more fish hiding in the corals just outside the mangroves.

I found a coral banded pipefish in a small cave.  I was excited to see it, and also excited that I had managed to find this myself.

In the afternoon, we saw an oceanic manta from the big boat while in transit.

Day 6: Penemu

The first dive was at Melissa’s Garden, which was our first site in northern Raja Ampat.  It’s a large area with very healthy hard coral – mostly staghorn and cabbage – and a lot of fish. It’s one of those sites that makes you understand the phrase “coral garden” where the coral goes on and on.

We saw two pygmy seahorses on a single fan, which was nice.  

There were also quite a few other divers around, which was noticeable given how spread out the site is.  I have to say that this was a bit annoying.  Up until today, we had been in the Misool area.  One nice thing about Misool (or not nice, depending on how you look at it) is that the Misool Eco Resort schedules all of the dive boats onto the sites in the area (by agreement between the various dive operators).  So on the negative side, it means you might not get to go to the site you want at the exact time that you want.  But on the positive side, when you go to a site, you have that site.  There are a crazy number of liveaboards in Raja Ampat, but this makes it so that no site is crowded.  It’s a very nice system.  So on this, our first dive outside of Misool, you could definitely see the difference.

I skipped the second dive here, as I was coming down with a cold (that had been going around the boat), and thought it would be better to rest.

The third dive was at Batu Rufus. It’s a sloping reef that ends at a small arch in about 10 feet of water.  I didn’t think this site was especially interesting overall. Other divers seemed to be really into the arch, and it was a nice arch, but… it was just an arch.  It wasn’t bad, just not particularly memorable compared to some of the others.

One of the other divers (Ben) did find a mushroom coral pipefish near the end of the dive, which was probably the highlight.

In the afternoon, we did a hike up to an overlook that is apparently the overlook where the canonical pictures of Raja Ampat are shot from… this is how it was described to me, and I think I know the shots they were talking about!  The hike was just enough steps to make me want to die, but not enough to make me actually die.  Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration.  It was supposedly 300-400 steps, which by my calculation makes it like 4 to 5 times as many steps as the walk up from Carmel beach to the road.  This is how I convinced myself it would not actually kill me, and also how I passed the time on the walk up – by doing step math.

Afterward, we went for a little boat ride where we zoomed around between the little islands, and eventually we popped out within sight of the boat, in a completely different spot than where we had come in.

Day 5: Fiabacet/Tomolol

The first two dives were at Nudi Rock and Tank Rock, which are right next to each other and effectively the same reef.

There were a lot of fish and a decent amount of fans and soft corals. On the second dive, Rob went off with Appe to shoot macro and managed to find a pygmy seahorse.  We also saw a pygmy on our dive, which Vicky found, so that evened things out.  It was a very nice pygmy sighting, so after the dive we nervously waited for Rob to return to see if he had found one too (phew).

The number of fish, and the number of different kinds of fish, was pretty high across both dives. It felt like one of those sites where everywhere you look there is something different.  I kept thinking it was like Cordell Bank (in terms of number of fish) but with 20 different species of fish instead of one :)  We also saw one turtle on the reef.

By the way, in case you are wondering about the name “Nudi Rock” it is not because there are a particular number or kind of nudibranch on the site… it’s because the rock that sticks out above the water is shaped like a nudibranch, and it really is.  I must admit I was less bought into “Tank Rock” being shaped like a tank.

In the afternoon, we went to a jellyfish lake on the way north. I’ve never been to a jellyfish lake before.  There were not quite as many jellyfish as there are in some that I’ve seen pictures of, but there was a decent aggregation in some spots.  Still pretty cool to see.  The speedboat ride through the islands on the way there and back was also very nice.