Diving from a liveaboard, and a mothership liveaboard at that, is quite different from diving from a resort.

• More dive sites. A liveaboard allows you to cover 2-3 atolls in a week whereas staying at a single resort doesn't allow you to do that.



• The standard affordable liveaboards will bring you to the most popular dive sites in the main atolls, but this means that they take more or less fixed routes, and are unlikely to change their route, say to avoid diving in the same place as 5 other liveaboards. This is because they are obliged to bring guests to the more well-known dive sites like Maaya Thila and Fish Head - but to do this, AND get you back to Male by Saturday, they must reach certain places by certain days. Within those certain places, there are only so many place they can anchor, hence the chosen dive sites will be those near the anchoring point, not the other way round. As a result, the majority of the 17 dive sites are fixed. The most common routes are: North Male - Rasdhoo - Ari - South Male - North Male (or vice versa); South Male - Felidhu; or North Male - Baa Atoll or more rarely, to the less explored atolls.
  
  I don't have evidence that the more expensive, 'branded' liveaboards go wherever you want, but I would think that a higher price paid by the guest, or simply fully chartering the boat, would go to more customised service and partially to diesel consumption so that the boat can go to more remote and less crowded places.



• Standard site for night dive. Related to the above point, if you're on a standard 1-week liveaboard, your one night dive will most likely be Maaya Thila. This is probably for operational reasons - if you do a dive at the other dive sites, and since it'll most likely be a drift dive, spotting all divers after they ascend will take forever. (Which is why at Ellaidhoo Resort, night dives are only at their house reef, whose two only entry points are marked by a buoy and underwater lines.)



• 3 dives a day. Unless you're on an American liveaboard like the Aggressor which promises 5-6 dives a day if you want, the number of dives will be limited to 3 a day. On the Baani Explorer, you only do 1 dive on the first (check-in) day, and the boat does not move off from Male until Day 2. But because you pay for 17 dives, you will get no less than 17 dives.



• Easy on the arms. On a liveaboard, you don't have to unrig your equipment and rig it up again to a tank for every dive.



• Easy on the legs. No long treks from the boat to the shower to your room.



• Live by the bell! In a resort, you'd have to keep an eye on the time and turn up at the dive centre on time otherwise the boat will go without you. On a liveaboard, just live by the bell. The crew will ring a bell before a dive briefing and when meals are ready. It's a great system!



• Travelling time to dive sites. If your boat is a motherboat, you might still take about half an hour to reach your dive site on the dhoni, because the motherboat usually anchors in a lagoon.



• Type of dives. Due to the limited number of vessels and the small number of guests, liveaboard diving means that you will all dive together. I point this out because some resorts will size up their divers, and have loose groups of novice and advanced divers who will then dive separately in sites suitable for their level of experience. Not so on a liveaboard. You either dive with your fellow guests, or you skip the dive you don't want.



• Evening check-out allowed! As the boat arrives in Male the night before checkout day, you can actually choose to check out that very night and catch the late night flight back to Singapore. You only need to skip the morning dive.

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Dive Facilities

• 1 diving dhoni with compressor for tank-filling (air and Nitrox)



• no shower on the dhoni, but when you reach your motherboat, there's a fresh-water shower and a salt-water shower at the back



• one giant dunk tank (shaped like a huge bin)



• charging station for torches etc



• no camera-only dunk tank



• no tables for camera



• 1 speedboat



• there isn't a designated place for your equipment on the main boat, but it's a BOAT, so don't be shy and just put your equipment in a polite place for drying. Tie your wetsuit to the metal railings, slot your fins and booties between the wall railings and the wall, and put your BCD on the rooftop. Everyone does this on the last day, and the Baani becomes a nice, big dive equipment shop.



• 1 ENOS GPS system per buddy pair for emergencies in case you get swept kilometres away by the current. This is a very cool, waterproof cylindrical thingy, about less than a foot long, that will tell the captain exactly where you are, even if you're 10km away from the boat. This is provided free of charge, but if you abuse it and break the seal simply because you just want the dhoni to pick you up when an SMB is sufficient, you will have to pay a fee. If you lose it, you will have to pay a hefty sum.

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Checking In and Setting Up

When you board the boat on Sunday morning, you go to the saloon where you fill up the usual forms and show the guides your c-cards. Then, you're shown to your room where you separate your diving gear from your non-diving gear.

Bring out your diving gear and put it into one of the dive crates. The crew will check which crate belongs to you, and they'll put your crate and your buddy's crate side by side on the dive dhoni. This will be your own 'seat' on the dhoni, ie everyone has a fixed spot in the dhoni so there's no confusion.

When you can, hop onto the dhoni to set up your equipment. The first dive is on air, so you don't have to analyse the tank for Nitrox.

Then you just wait for your first dive.

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Checkout Dive

The checkout dive is relatively simple - I suspect it depends on the average level of experience of the divers on board. For the Baani, our checkout dive only required each buddy pair to release an SMB at the safety stop. No mask-clearing or sharing-air exercises. Our checkout dive was to Lankan Manta Point, a cleaning station for mantas.

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Surface Intervals

Surface intervals can be spent napping on the boat, reading, a swim in your private swimming pool (the Indian ocean), snorkelling above a reef, or frolicking on a sand bar or island. In the evening, you can fish.

The Baani Explorer will do their best to accommodate your non-diving hankerings. I didn't deliberately test them I swear, but when I was there, I asked them if we could snorkel, and they not only said yes, but they also came up with a plan of where and what time, and brought us to a variety of snorkelling sites. They would drop us off from the speedboat and were willing to wait under the sun, until they saw that we were ok, and then they said they'd come back after half an hour. They'll come back on the dot and when we sheepishly asked if we could have a little longer, they cheerfully said ok, and did as we asked.

One evening we were fishing on the rear platform, and although it was close to midnight, the crew gamely kept us company, and maximised our fishing enjoyment by making sure the full bucket of jumping, dying fish was covered, or catching the ones that jumped out and flapped around on the floor.

Have I mentioned that the Chivalry Meter is Excellent?

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