Our Honeymoon Was a Boat: Crossing the Banda Sea from Ambon to Raja Ampat

Eleven days on a wooden liveaboard, from Ambon through the Banda Sea to Raja Ampat. We spent our honeymoon underwater, and we'd do it again tomorrow.

Some couples do a beach resort for their honeymoon. A spa, maybe. Cocktails with little umbrellas. We got married and then boarded a wooden boat in Ambon for eleven days at sea, crossing the Banda Sea to Raja Ampat, four dives a day, no phone signal, salt in everything.

We have never regretted a decision less.

This was back in 2022, which in soggylife history is the before times: before the prototypes, before the Galápagos field test, back when getting into a wet wetsuit was still a nine-round wrestling match. But it’s where a lot of what we care about now quietly took shape. So here’s the dispatch we never wrote at the time.

The boat

The Jaya is the kind of boat that makes you stop mid-sentence when you approach her in the dinghy. Wooden hull, tall masts, gear benches under a canvas roof, everything smelling faintly of salt and diesel and varnish. We met her at Tulehu harbour in Ambon, hauled our bags aboard, and picked the numbered gear station that would be our tiny kingdom for the next eleven days.

Coming back from a night dive to see her lit up against the dark was the sort of moment you don’t photograph well and try anyway.

We tried anyway.

Eleven days, ten nights, one direction: east and north, from the Banda Sea up into Raja Ampat. Liveaboard life does its usual thing (we’ve written about that rhythm here): eat, dive, nap, repeat, until the days blur into one long saltwater loop. On a crossing like this, the reefs change under you as the boat moves. You fall asleep off one island group and wake up somewhere completely new.

Through the Banda Sea

The first days took us through the Banda Sea, past volcanic cones rising straight out of deep blue water. Nusa Laut, Suanggi, the walls around Banda. This is remote diving, the kind where the nearest recompression chamber is a serious conversation and the reefs feel like nobody’s been rude to them yet.

Then the boat pushed on toward the part we’d been quietly obsessing over for years.

Misool, and the small stuff that steals the show

Raja Ampat markets itself in wide angle: the fish storms, the mantas, the sweeping reef walls. All real, all there, all breathtaking. But what we still talk about at dinner is the macro life around Misool. There’s literally a site called Nudi Rock, and it earns the name.

The reefs there are so dense that every square meter is somebody’s neighborhood. Nudibranchs everywhere, and not shy ones. A green one dressed like it was going to a festival. A pink one so perfectly airbrushed it looked rendered. Our guide found an orange pygmy seahorse holding onto a fan in the surge, looking mildly annoyed at the current, which honestly, relatable.

The Nudi Rock parade, entries one and two.

And the classics deliver too. A spinecheek anemonefish defended its anemone against Caroline’s camera with everything a fish of eleven centimeters has to give.

In Raja, ask your guides to show you the small stuff. The wide-angle sites sell the trip, but the guides here find creatures you’d swim past a hundred times. Trust their eyes over your own.

What eleven days out there does to two people

No phone signal for most of it. No shoes, obviously. Somewhere around day three the boat becomes the whole world, and the world is about thirty meters long and smells like clove cigarettes and frying garlic when the crew cooks. We dove the Dampier Strait near the end, and on the last afternoon the boat stopped at a little island called Mioskon so we could watch flying foxes pour out of the trees at dusk. Newlyweds, sunburned, salt-crusted, holding hands on a wooden deck while the sky filled with bats. Ten out of ten, would marry again.

Somewhere down there, looking for the next tiny thing.

Some of what we make now was shaped by weeks exactly like this one. Boats like the Jaya, where wetsuit changes are a daily wrestle and your feet pay for it, are where the idea of gear that actually feels like you starts to make sense. We didn’t know it yet, standing on that deck as a just-married couple. But the seed was there.

The crossing ends the same way it began, quietly. Day eleven, an early ferry from Waisai, dry land that won’t stop moving under your feet for another day. We stepped off with wedding rings, salty hair, and the firm conviction that we’d found our version of a honeymoon.

Raja Ampat is far. Getting there takes planes, patience, and a ferry’s worth of logistics. Go anyway. Take someone you just married, if you can.

Been out there, or dreaming about it? Tell us what the current showed you. Stay soggy.