The Incredible Crossing Cruise

There are dive trips you take for the animals. Others for the reefs. And sometimes, a route delivers both – with volcanic islands in the distance, sea snakes weaving through the reef, and conditions that keep every dive feeling fresh.

We started our journey aboard Mermaid One in Raja Ampat, renowned for its exceptional marine biodiversity and stunning reefs. On one of our early dives, we found a wide wobbegong stretched out over hard coral, blending in so well you could almost swim right over it if you weren’t paying attention. Classic Raja Ampat: fish everywhere, colour everywhere, and always something beautiful hiding in plain sight.

From there, we dropped into the Banda Sea, with stops at the volcanic islands of Manuk and Suanggi. At Manuk, sea kraits were everywhere, sometimes dozens on a single dive, weaving through the reef or hunting alongside schools of bluefin trevally. One of the trip highlights was diving in the Banda Sea was the dive sight Lava Flow – a sprawling coral garden that grew from the cooled lava of a 1988 eruption. It’s the kind of site that makes you pause, not just for the beauty, but for how much life has bounced back. Huge coral formations stretched in every direction, with reef fish darting through the branches and the kind of visibility that makes wide-angle photography a dream.

As we made our way toward Ambon, the dives started to shrink in scale – not in quality, just in size. The macro life here is on another level. Frogfish, octopus, eels, ghost pipefish – all packed into a few square meters if you looked close enough. One of our favorite finds was a small frogfish fishing for prey.

Not every trip gives you reef, pelagic, macro, and volcanos all in one go – but this crossing had it all.

John Roney
Mermaid I
04-06 to 17, 2025