My Take on Diving at Raja Ampat with Flow DC
Written by Roy Kittrell, December 2024.
This year, one of Flow Dive’s most adventurous trips yet came when the crew went to Raja Ampat, Indonesia!
Located in West Papua, this is one of the premier diving locations in the world, and rated as some of the best reefs still around today. We would be staying aboard the beautiful Amaya Explorer for the entirety of our 6 days and 18 dives trip. This was a beautiful wooden vessel equipped with everything we would need for our diving trip, including a Starlink connection allowing for high speed internet connection to upload all of our snaps!
We arrived early on the 9th of December and spent the day loading our luggage, setting up our equipment and doing orientation. After going to sleep that night, we awoke to an utterly stunning and truly breathtaking view – Wayag Island!
From here we were able to launch straight into the diving, seeing all kinds of fantastic reefs and sealife, from stunning coralscapes to reef mantas and dazzling arrays of fish. I had come personally prepared with my full underwater mirrorless camera set up; including 2x new strobes that I hoped would help me capture some amazing pictures underwater! The corals and sponges across the entire area were truly spectacular, almost every size and shape that I could have imagined and fish of every size and shape were all present. It was a truly stunning landscape underwater and I couldn’t have been more lucky to see it.
There were two sharks I was particularly on the lookout for – the tasseled wobbegong shark, Eucrossorhinus dasypogon, and the fabled walking shark, also known as the Speckled Carpetshark, Hemiscyllium freycineti. We ended up seeing our first wobbegong on our check dive at the very beginning of the trip; and saw many more on our further dives. I was also lucky enough to see a walking shark moving through the reef, who ended up posing and allowing me to get a few shots on one of our night dives. We also had a really amazing evening on one of the days; where we get to swim around in a shallow area with a large group of blacktip reef sharks, who allowed me to get in close and fire off some really amazing pics.
On the last day of our trip as we continued to do our final surface interval, a truly amazing outing was offered for us – we could go into the jungle of Waigeo Island where we would be greeted by the local people, and see two species of the birds of paradise, Wilson’s Bird of Paradise and the Red Bird of Paradise! A really stunning and amazing opportunity that could have easily been an entire trip on its own for me.
All said, everyone agreed it was a trip of a lifetime – every dive was an adventure and presented us with seascapes that we have only seen in nature documentaries and our dreams. A hopefully not once in a lifetime trip with a truly memorable team.
Check out Flow’s dive trips to experience amazing diving with fun and energetic dive buddies. If you haven’t been diving in a while, they’ll help you refresh your skills in time for your trips. For more information, just email or speak to Flow!
Roy Kittrell is an avid naturalist and underwater photographer, his work can be found on instagram @roythedivebro