The dive boat experience

The Live-aboard experience.

On Sunday, from Cebu Marina we got on board the Inifiti; a boat that is built specifically for recreational diving. It is the most luxurious and extravagant thing I have ever booked as a backpacker and so I didn't know what to expect from the other people on board, but they weren't going to be other backpackers!

There is room for 22 guests altogether, on our trip we are 19. It is mixed group of nationalities; South Africans, Australians, Americans, Chinese and a few of us from various place in Europe. The director of the boat is a young guy from Ukraine and his Taiwanese girlfriend is one of the main dive guides. The crew are all phillipino and there are plenty of them-boat guys, dive guides, chef and kitchen staff, captain and assistant and housekeepers. So there are a lot of us, but it is quite a big boat so it's certainly not crowded. Most of the guests are very experienced divers, some are instructors themselves and most have done a live aboard before. So I am the baby of group, in experience, but not age-the age range is between 18-72. We all have a shared interest and each day as we come back from dives we have more to talk about, we have communal meals and free alcohol on board….so naturally it has began to feel like we are one big family. To begin with I felt it was a lot of dive junkie enthusiasts and that I would not keep up with the chat, but actually we find plenty else to talk about and friendships are being formed.

The boat is a 48 meter yacht with 4 floors, 11 guests cabins, a huge sundeck, large dining area, room dedicated to computer and camera gear, a deck for dive equipment and a launch deck for the dingys. We reach our dive sites in smaller boats and we roll off them into the sea.

The boat slogan is 'Eat. Dive. Sleep.’ and this is exactly what we did. The days started between 6.30-7.30am and we would do 3-4 dives a day, taking longer sails overnight to reach a new dive site and shorter sails in the afternoon to reach anew dive site. We could do 2-3 dives on one site, taking a different part of the reef or different side of the island. Most sites were coral walls or coral gardens that were just off the coast of a beautiful island. The best dives were usually the early morning ones, as we started before other divers who need to travel from land and therefore we had the peace of the site all to ourselves. We also did one night dive, which was incredibly peaceful and where we saw lots of weird looking creatures that come out after dark. The best dives we did we would see multiple sea turtles and have very close encounters, many eels, clown fish and lion fish everywhere and some hugemongous schools of sardine and jackfish. I've never seen anything like it, the size of the schools make you feel so small even though the individual fish are really small. Altogether we did 17 dives in 5 days at a maximum depth of around 30 meters and maximum time of one hour. The deeper you go the quicker you use your air and our dive guide would spend a lot of time in the depths so we rarely met full dive time, which was slightly annoying. We were put into groups of 4-5 and had an experienced guide who had dived the sites many times and could lead the way. It's necessary when you aren't experienced to manage your own dives, but the divers who were instructors themselves could manage the route themselves.

Being underwater is one of my favourite places, it is so peaceful and can be incredibly beautiful. I liken it to safari in africa-there is always anticipation that an encounter can be about to happen. And you can observe the natural behaviours of the creatures in the sea-mating rituals, feeding, sleeping and cleaning each other or themselves on coral. It's a fascinating world down there and in this week I have cherished the moment. Whenever I am having a hard day at work I imagine being under the sea and so every time I went down I reminded myself this.

Other than the diving the trip basically involved eating and sleeping. The food was incredible and there was plenty of it. And the alcohol was all freeze so we would enjoy sunset with beers together every evening. Once we finished our last dive of the trip we drank the bar dry and had a song and dance celebrating birthdays-there had been 3 of them during the week.

It was a great week, something I would definitely do again. It is so nice not having to think about anything, everything being organised for us. I read a whole book and switched off to everything other than the Ocean. Bliss.

The route we covered and name of the dive sites is on a photo below.Read more