Liveaboard

A dive trip where you live on the boat for days or weeks, diving 3 to 4 times daily at remote sites day boats cannot reach.

A liveaboard is a dive trip where the boat is also the hotel: you eat, sleep, and dive from the same vessel for anywhere from three nights to two weeks. The format exists to reach diving that day boats cannot, remote atolls, offshore banks, and long island chains, and to maximize time in the water, with a typical rhythm of three or four dives a day including night dives, framed by the classic eat, sleep, dive routine.

Life aboard is efficient by design. Your gear stays assembled at a numbered station on the dive deck, tanks are refilled in place between dives, and the day runs on briefings and a bell. Nitrox is near universal on liveaboards because repetitive multi-day diving loads tissues steadily; so are conservative computer habits and a mandatory surface interval before the flight home, commonly 24 hours.

The legendary routes are liveaboard-only or close to it: the Maldives atolls, Egypt's offshore Red Sea, Indonesia's Raja Ampat and Komodo, Palau, the Galapagos, and Australia's Coral Sea. For a logbook, a good liveaboard week is a windfall, 20 plus dives, and site names you will spend years trying to get back to. Pack spares for everything, there is no dive shop at sea.