WHY LIVE ABOARD?
Wake dive eat dive eat dive eat dive eat sleep.
Repeat!
For divaholics only? Quite possibly!
But it's also about experiencing the glorious spectacle of the Sun arising and a'setting at the bookends of the day. The pre-dawn darkness ebbs away and our special part of the World slowly awakens, but the silence remains - no roosters or lawnmowers out here!

The crew stirs down below, the divers are a little slower off the mark... until the boat's generator kicks into action - then, we're definitely into the day. A quick cuppa, then into the dinghy for the Dawn Dive.

The cool water snaking into every nook and cranny in the wetsuit expels any last trace of sleepiness. The colours, at first muted, steadily increase in radiance as the Sun creeps higher into the sky, sending shafts of light ever deeper into 'the bathtub'.

To have such an experience on a daytrip would mean an early start indeed!

Back aboard the mothership the breakfast conversation is punctuated with recollections of sights just seen and of similar sights seen elsewhere. When a bunch of divers get together, there's never a shortage of stories - some true, some truer! And there's always a comment along the lines that 'it sure beats sitting in peak hour traffic' - just as a reminder (in case anyone was to need one) that there are far worse places to be.

A leisurely cruise takes us to the next dive site - the Sun is climbing ever higher and the sunlight penetrates ever deeper, increasing the pulse of activity beneath the water's shimmering surface. The daytime feeders are out in force now, from the swarms of small plankton feeders to the apex of the predator pyramid.

Back to the mothership and it's time to eat again. Lunch, more stories and perhaps a siesta as we move to the next dive site.

Each dive is different; even at the same site the mid-afternoon experience can be dramatically different from that of the mid-morning dive. Mantas appear when you don't expect them to, and don't appear when you do! On a liveaboard there's the flexibility to mosey around different dive sites to find those that best suit our desires - a luxury not often afforded by daytrip schedules.

After the dazzling sunset...the piece de resistance for liveaboards. You can go on a night dive, get out of the water and under a nice warm shower, then sit down to dinner; all in the time it would take a dayboat to get half way back to shore.

Am I now a fan of liveaboards? You bet!