I want to be fair to the liveaboard dive boat because the liveaboard is genuinely excellent at what it does and because the person who is considering the Naora leg and who has been on liveaboards before deserves the honest comparison rather than the dismissal. The liveaboard dive boat is the right format for the committed diver who wants four to five dives per day in the world’s finest dive sites and who wants the offshore access to the sites that the shore-based day boat cannot reach.
The Red Sea liveaboard on the Brothers Islands and the Daedalus Reef. The Raja Ampat liveaboard in the coral heart of the Coral Triangle. The Banda Sea liveaboard on the seamounts off Ambon. These are the serious offshore dive operations that the serious offshore diver knows and that deliver the diving at the quality the remote offshore site produces. They are excellent.
The liveaboard dive boat is built around the diving. Everything on the boat, the schedule, the meals, the wake-up call, the briefing, the entry and the exit, the surface interval and the next dive, is organised around the four to five dives per day that the liveaboard programme delivers.
The non-diving member of the group does not exist on the liveaboard because the group is the group of divers who came for the diving. The surface interval between dives is the time that produces the best nitrogen off-gassing for the next dive rather than the time that produces the best opportunity for the waterskiing or the passage navigation or the conversation at the Long Table. The liveaboard is the diving life with accommodation attached.
What the Liveaboard Cannot Provide
The liveaboard dive boat cannot provide the offshore sailing passage, the days of open ocean transit between the dive sites that the offshore sailing vessel makes into the experience rather than the logistics. The liveaboard passage between the Brothers Islands and the Daedalus Reef is the passage the boat makes while the divers rest between sites.
The Naora passage between the Brothers Islands and the Daedalus Reef is the Red Sea offshore passage, the specific conditions of the Red Sea at the latitude where the northerly wind meets the swell from the south, the navigation through the shipping lanes of the busiest international maritime corridor in the world, the night sky above the Red Sea that the offshore night produces in the conditions of the sea between Africa and Arabia.
The liveaboard cannot provide the community of the twelve people who are not all divers but who are all present for the offshore sailing life in which the diving is one of the dimensions. The Naora leg member who does not dive still has the morning swim from the platform, the freediving programme with me if they want to learn, the snorkelling at the reef, and the full offshore sailing life as the context of the leg.
The non-diver and the diver share the same boat and the same table and the same passage and the same anchorage. The liveaboard group is the group of divers. The Naora group is the group of people who came for the offshore life, of whom the divers are a subset.
The liveaboard costs: the Red Sea Brothers Islands liveaboard at the quality level comparable to the Naora diving programme runs €2,000 to €3,500 per person per week, including the diving. This is the diving-specific cost, the accommodation and the meals and the diving together, without the offshore sailing life surrounding them.
The Naora Coastal membership at €9,000 per year for one week costs more per week than the comparable liveaboard. What it costs more for is the offshore sailing life that the liveaboard’s diving specialisation removes from the equation. The diving is the same quality. Everything around the diving is categorically different.
