Solitude Adventurer

★ 5 · None None · 2023-03-12

Amazing liveaboard. This is my 15th liveaboard and it was one of the best! Rooms are spacious and updated. Boat layout is nice with plenty of space including a nice camera room. Staff is super helpful and friendly! They will carry your camera, help you with your fins and wetsuit, take care of your gear, etc. they are so helpful! The food was outstanding! Even their vegan and vegetarian options were so good. The schedule is perfect with 3-4 dives a day but you don’t feel too rushed. The boat had plenty of hot water for those of us that love a hot shower. Dive guides and cruise directors and helpful and fun to be around. I highly recommend this boat!

★ 5 · Valerie Dodge · 2019-08-24

I dove with Adventurer in it’s first season in Raja Ampat in Feb of 2019 I believe during my Chinese New Years holiday. The boat was so new back then that the marketing team for Solitude was on board taking photos and videos I was still a relatively new diver and this was my second liveaboard (the first beginning a short 2 night trip for my AOW) I since done one in Belize and I can now say that Solitude Adventurer will probably always be my gold standard for liveaboards. Let’s talk about the boat first. In a previous life, SA was a private yacht. This double wide catamaran doesn’t even feel like you’re on a boat. Though lounge/dining area is huge and super comfortable. I believe all the cabins on the upper deck but one (the one I was in) have stunning floor to ceiling windows. Which i haven’t seen in many other ships. There’s a huge dive deck, a deck on the back where we all hung out at night and a lovely sun deck where we hung out in the afternoons and had a BBQ night. My one complaint was that there was only two lounge chairs on the sun deck there definitely was demand for more. There were 18 guests on board and I’m pretty sure there were 16 crew members and they took care of us so well. The dive guides where very friendly, knowledge and took great care of us. Every group of 4-5 guests get their own guide and these guys are great at spotting macro life. Because you go out in skiffs, every group gets dropped off at a different spot at the dive site so often times it does feel like you and your group are out there on your own until you cross paths with another group rounding the atoll which is fun. The dives at the cleaning stations can be a bit crowded but you don’t really care because you spend 40 minutes watching mantas swim over. One one dive I even had an oceanic manta come check me out, he landed on top of me and I was literally under it’s wing for a good few minutes! You also really max your dives since the skiff meets you at the surface and there’s no swimming back to the boat. SA is very flexible and reactive to the condition in the water. They will go out an check currents before planning a dive and also check in with few other boats in the area to see when they are diving and sometimes we jumped early to improve our dive experience. I’m not a foodie so I don’t have much to say about the food except that the hot made to order breakfasts after the first morning dive were great and I recall there being a wide variety options. The diving in Raja Ampat is incredible and SA makes it a true lux experience. Which reminds me that the massage chair on board at first seemed a little gimmicky but ended up being a fan favourite and there was no charge for using it! I do a lot of vacation traveling and I’ve done the range of high-end to low-end experiences. I can say with 100% seriousness that Solitude Adventurer was one of those high-end full lux experiences that was worth every penny! In fact, it was so good that I have a personal goal of diving on all the Solitude boats and at all the Solitude resorts.