My daughter Maisie was four the first summer she found a shore crab under a rock at Cadgwith Cove, and she screamed so loudly that a man eating a pasty on the harbour wall dropped half of it into the water. I teach Year 2 at a primary school in Reading, so I’m used to screaming. That one was different. Every August after that ran the same way in Cornwall. Maisie would lie flat on her stomach over a pool for an hour with her red plastic bucket, the one with the split handle, while the rest of us went slowly blue (her dad calls it the vigil).
When she was nine, she told us she was saving up to see a real coral reef, and I laughed, which I still feel a bit bad about.
She’d found Raja Ampat in a library book about oceans, a scatter of roughly 1,500 islands off the far eastern end of Indonesia with more kinds of fish and coral than anywhere else anyone has counted. There are hardly any hotels, and the good reefs sit too far apart to reach from one base, so visitors tend to sleep on small boats that move between sites overnight. In Raja Ampat, geography dictates the journey as much as the sea itself, and Neptuneliveaboards.com Raja Ampat liveaboard snorkelling itineraries reflect a travel style built around moving quietly between reefs, lagoons and remote island passages. Maisie kept that page of the library book folded down until it was six weeks overdue.
The Jam Jar on the Windowsill
She kept her money in a Bonne Maman jar next to the kitchen tap. Most of it came from birthday cards, and the rest from painted pebbles she sold outside our front gate on a Saturday in June 2024 (a hedgehog pebble went for £4, which I thought was daylight robbery). By last spring it held £287.40.
Cadgwith, if you’ve never been, still winches its fishing boats up the shingle by hand crank, and the pub there does a crab sandwich I’d drive four hours for.
I’ll be straight about what her savings bought, because it wasn’t the holiday. The boat for the three of us came to £9,340 for seven nights, and the flights added £3,212, and her dad and I had been putting money aside since 2023 without telling her. Her jar paid for her own mask and snorkel, a rash vest with a turtle on the front, a waterproof pouch and a chunk of the marine park fee. I’d expected her to want the money back for something else by the second year. But she never touched it.
The Mistake I Made With the First Boat
On a Sunday night in January 2025, I emailed five boats, and before a single one had replied,d I told Maisie the name of the one I liked best. She drew it that evening in felt tips, two masts and a very large fish underneath, and stuck it on the fridge with a magnet from St Ives. The reply came on the Wednesday. Minimum age fourteen. She was eleven. She didn’t cry, which was somehow worse, and she took the drawing down herself and asked me to check the ages first next time. It took another three weeks to find a boat that ran family departures and had carried children her age before, and the crew there asked for her swimming certificate before they’d confirm anything.
Check the age limit before you say a boat’s name out loud in front of a child.
What Our Days on the Boat Looked Like
The routine settled by the second morning.
- Breakfast on the top deck at seven
- A snorkel before ten, while the water was flattest
- Lunch, then a lie-down in the cabin while the boat moved to the next island, which Maisie fought every day and then slept through anyway
- A swim off a beach in the afternoon
- Squid spotting with a torch after dinner
Our guide, Markus, was from Waisai and kept a laminated fish card clipped to his belt, very like the one Maisie had made for Cornwall out of magazine cut-outs and sticky-back plastic. They compared them on the first evening. His had 118 fish on it, and hers had nineteen, and she asked him to sign hers anyway.
The Lagoon at Quarter to Seven
The morning I think about most was a Tuesday in the Easter holidays, April 2026, in a shallow lagoon near Wayag, and we were in the water by quarter to seven because Markus said the light would be best before the wind came up. The water was barely up to my waist and so clear the sand looked close enough to touch. Maisie had drifted ahead of me with her face down and her fins hardly moving. Then she stopped. I swam over expecting a sea cucumber or a crab, something from home, and found her hovering over a baby blacktip reef shark no longer than my forearm, patrolling back and forth along the edge of the sand as if it were waiting for a bus. She didn’t move for eleven minutes. I know it was eleven because Markus timed it on his watch. And when she finally lifted her head,d her mask had filled with water from grinning, so she coughed and put it straight back on.
Blacktip pups use those shallow lagoons as nurseries, Markus told us later, because the bigger sharks can’t follow them in.
Planning a Family Raja Ampat Liveaboard
Most boats sell themselves as a dive cruise Indonesia holiday, and it’s hard to tell from the websites how welcome children and snorkellers will be. On ours there were four divers and seven snorkellers, and the guides split their time fairly between the two groups. If you’re weighing up a Raja Ampat liveaboard snorkelling trip with children, a couple of things are worth sorting early.
- Ask each boat about its minimum age and whether it runs family departures.
- Book a travel clinic appointment at least eight weeks before you fly, because parts of West Papua carry a malaria risk and some vaccinations need time to take effect.
Getting there takes a while. We flew from Heathrow to Jakarta through Doha and spent a night near the airport. The 5:15 flight east to Sorong the next morning made it about twenty-nine hours of travelling in total. Pack soft bags, since the cabins are small and there’s nowhere to put a hard suitcase. The October to April season doesn’t line up with the long summer holiday, so most of the families we met on board had come at Easter or February half-term.
Where She’s Got To
Maisie’s twelve now and has decided she wants to be a marine biologist, or possibly a vet, depending on the week. She’s told her whole class about the shark pup twice, and her teacher sent a note home asking if she’d bring the photos in. I’m honestly not sure whether the Raja Ampat liveaboard week started something new or just confirmed what the rock pools at Cadgwith had already done.
There’s £14.60 in the jar on the windowsill again. I haven’t asked what it’s for yet.
