Carpe Diem Liveaboard

The cabins were spacious/comfortable & the food was much better than I expected for buffet style. The crew was helpful/attentive & their chef was at every meal to make sure we had everything we needed. They even made me a birthday cake 🥳🥂. My roommate was vegan and often shared with non-vegans for how good it was. The diving seemed to be typical for late August. I had some awesome encounters with eagle rays, schools of barracudas, a very sleepy cuddle fish and even got to see a great hammerhead shark along with many other species of reef sharks. Their reefs are still healthy looking in many parts we visited and the hard corals are huge in some places. The guides were attentive and made sure to point out even the smallest wildlife resembling sea grass. They were also very conscientious of safety for ourselves/wildlife and that our interactions as well as other dive groups not part of our boat were being respectful too. I would recommend this boat for how they run their operation. Mantas were very scarce the whole trip and visibly wasn’t the best (common for late August) but our group seemed to understand the ocean doesn’t owe us anything. We didn’t get a chance to go into Hanifaru Bay for a lack of mantas but there was a whale shark swimming around outside the park near anchored boats. This was mostly a chaotic chase of various tender boats trying to dump groups snorkelers close to the whale shark. However, the Carpe Diem dive dhoani kept a very respectful distance while letting us in. As a heads up: the amount of people chasing wildlife from other boats can be a bit much even for being the off season of tourism.