Tender Support & Liveaboard Turnaround, Raja Ampat

How a turnaround day actually runs

The pattern the whole liveaboard fleet uses, hour by hour: outgoing guests come off at first light and move to Sorong for flights; the vessel takes its jetty window at Waisai — or works at anchor by tender — for provisioning, water, fuel and waste; incoming guests land at Sorong’s DEO airport, are met, and travel out on the public fast ferry (two hours, normally 09:00 and 14:00 departures each way) or a private speedboat on their own schedule; by late afternoon they board and the vessel sails. Every piece of that is a coordination task, and any piece that slips — a late flight, a missed ferry, a supply boat behind schedule — eats the itinerary. Our job is that nothing slips, and when something does, the plan already has the fallback in it.

Tender services: standby boats, boatmen, fuelling, landings

Between turnarounds, the working need is tenders: a standby boat for guest excursions when your own tender is committed, an experienced local boatman who knows the reef passes and village landings, outboard fuel run out to a working anchorage, and shore landings arranged where a jetty — or a village’s permission — is involved. The desk books all of it from a network of vetted local boats at Waisai and the Dampier Strait, priced per day or per run in USD. Local knowledge is the real product: which pass carries at low water, which landing belongs to which village, and who to greet first when you step ashore.

Base-port packages for phinisi and dive liveaboards

Operators running a Raja Ampat season do not want twelve separate quotes; they want a base port. The seasonal package contracts the recurring pieces once — jetty windows on your turnaround dates, standing provisioning and water orders, waste collection, guest transfer coordination for every rotation, and a named desk contact through the season — under a single agreement issued by PT Komodo Vessel Management. Berthing between trips and watched-mooring cover slot into the same contract; see the berthing and mooring booking page for how vessel-parking options work here.

Working with resorts and dive operators

Guest programs in the Dampier Strait touch the resort islands — Kri, Gam, Arborek — and the courtesy infrastructure matters: dive-site moorings have working priority for dive boats, resort jetties are private, and village visits run on invitation. We coordinate timings with the operators concerned so your tender arrives expected, not explained. Guests joining or leaving mid-itinerary ride the same transfer machinery described on the crew change and guest transfers page. For the wider charter context in these same waters, the group’s charter side publishes its Raja Ampat destination desk at Komodo Luxury — the itineraries our support work sits underneath.

Rates and scheduling

Per-call pricing in USD: guest transfer coordination per rotation, standby tender per day, boatman per day, deliveries per run — indicative ranges are open on the cost guide, and provisioning-day logistics are detailed on the provisioning page. Seasonal base-port packages are quoted against your published schedule. Two weeks’ notice books a clean turnaround in high season; the desk answers same-week requests with what is genuinely available.