If you’ve never been on a liveaboard, and you are considering a liveaboard trip, you will love it! I love liveaboard diving, as you spend the whole time diving with likeminded people. But you may be new to scuba diving, and you might want to know how many dives do you need for a liveaboard.
To help you choose the right liveaboard for you and how many dives you’ve done personally, I have included a table of over 330 worldwide liveaboards and how many dives you need for each liveaboard in the table.
The number of dives you need for a liveaboard range from no minimum to 100 logged dives, which is impacted by the type of diving involved. If the type of diving is deeper diving or involves diving in currents, more experience is needed and more logged dives are required to book the liveaboard trip.
Please use the table to help you choose the right liveaboard for you, as this will help you match your number of dives with the liveaboard trip and type of diving involved. But I recommend you also read below for my thoughts on how many dives you should have before you book a liveaboard.
To search for how many dives you need for a liveaboard, use the section below “Other filters” and select the minimum logged dives that suits your diving ability.
So for example, if you have 20 logged dives, select “No minimum number of logged dives”, “Minimum 3-5 logged dives”, “Minimum 10 logged dives”, and/or “Minimum 20 logged dives”, as each of these categories will suit your level of experience.
You can search on each of these one by one, or select multiple, or all at the same time. Plus add in some of your other search requirements too, like the country in which you want to dive and what luxuries are included onboard.
There is a balance between holding off booking a liveaboard so you have time to build up enough dives so you have the confidence to dive vs booking a liveaboard with the number of dives you’ve already done and to gain the experience of diving from a liveaboard.
Either way, liveaboard diving provides one of the best opportunities to build your number of logged dives.
Depending on the liveaboard you choose and the type of diving involved, you can sometimes be diving up to four times a day. Which means that over a week of diving on a liveaboard you could add more than 20 dives to your dive log.
So choose your first liveaboard based on how many dives you have dived now, then after that you may have enough dives to book a another liveaboard that requires even more logged dives, and so on.
Other thoughts on choosing a liveaboard and how many dives you need beforehand.
Type of diving from a liveaboard will affect how many dives you need
The type of diving the liveaboard offers will affect how many dives are needed to book the trip, for example:
Deep dives: If the diving is mostly deep diving you will need to have more experience, and therefore more logged dives to dive.
Currents: If there are currents involved on some or all of the dives the liveaboard visits, you will need the necessary drift diving experience and a higher number of logged dives to do the diving for safety.
Shark diving: Some liveaboards consider it necessary to have more logged dives when they know that divers will encounter sharks. Not that shark diving is a dangerous, but when you are diving with sharks you need to be a confident diver and have experience of a number of dives before coming up close with one.
Diving more instils confidence
When you are choosing a liveaboard to dive from, don’t necessarily book when you only have the minimum number of dives needed.
I suggest you have a reasonable number of dives logged before you book, which might be say 20 dives minimum. This way you will be able to enjoy all the dives on offer and use the liveaboard experience to enhance your skills further.
Having more logged dives means you will enjoyment all the diving
You want to be able to dive all dives on offer on any liveaboard trip, which doesn’t mean you have to dive everytime, but at least it gives you the opportunity to do so.
If you’ve not got the right level of experience, it might mean you have to miss some of the dives that require a bit more diving experience. You don’t want to find this is what happens on a liveaboard trip, as many liveaboards are quite expensive.
Your safety when diving on a liveaboard
The reason the liveaboard company sets how many dives are needed for a liveaboard is for safety reasons. I am sure you want to be safe when you dive, and by being safe you will enjoy the dives that much more.
I hope you enjoyed this article about how many dives do you need for a liveaboard
I’d love to hear from you. Tell us about your adventures of diving and snorkeling, in the comments below. Please also share your photos. Either from your underwater cameras or videos from your waterproof Gopro’s!
If this article hasn’t answered all of your questions. If you have more questions either about snorkeling or scuba diving (or specifically about how many dives do you need for a liveaboard), please comment below with your questions.
There will also be many more articles about scuba diving (and snorkeling) for you to read and learn about these fabulous sports.
Have fun and be safe!
How Many Dives Do You Need For A Liveaboard?
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Article written by Russell Bowyer who has been a scuba diver since diving on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in 1989. After his first dive he trained as a BSAC diver in the UK. He attained his Diver Leader certification with BSAC. He then went on to become a scuba diving instructor, teaching others how to dive and was voted as Diving Officer and Treasurer for the Saffron Walden BSAC club too. Russell has dived all over the world, including the UK, on liveaboards in the Red Sea, the Caribbean, South Africa and the USA. Russell is experienced in all dive types, including drift diving, deep dives that involved decompression stops and recreational dives too.
