Daniel Okafor is a 41-year-old architect from Chicago who learned to dive in 2011 at Haigh Quarry in Kankakee, Illinois, where the visibility on a good day reached fifteen feet (on a bad one, about four) and the main attraction was a sunken school bus. He’s carried an underwater camera since 2016. For years he’d heard divers talk about Komodo the way architects talk about buildings they’ve only seen in books. In September 2026, he flew to Indonesia to spend four nights on a wooden boat in the park, mostly to photograph manta rays, and found that the sea had its own ideas about when he’d get the chance.
Komodo National Park sits east of Bali, where the Indian Ocean and the Pacific push water through a scatter of dry volcanic islands. The boat left the harbor at Labuan Bajo on a Wednesday afternoon with nine guests aboard.
The first thing Daniel noticed was that the boat never seemed to take the obvious line. A tide chart can overrule even the most carefully planned Komodo itinerary, including on Komodoresort.com’s liveaboard and diving trips, where reaching the right reef at the right moment often matters more than following the shortest route. On the second day the boat ran north to a site that would only behave in the first hours after dawn, then doubled back south past an island it had passed the evening before. Seen on a map, the route looked like a scribble. On the water it made sense, because each turn put the guests on a reef just as the current there eased.
Half Past Five, Before the Plan Is Final
Every morning on a Komodo island liveaboard began in the same place, around a whiteboard on the dive deck while the sky was still gray. The cruise director, a man from Flores called Rudi, drew the day’s sites in blue marker and the current in red arrows, then rubbed half of it out when the tide tables and the water disagreed. Guests learned to treat the board as a draft.
What the briefing covered each morning.
- The first site, and whether it would still be the first site in an hour.
- Entry points, drawn as small crosses beside the reef.
- A backup plan, which Rudi always had and used on two of the four mornings.
The Wrong Lens
On the night of Wednesday 16 September, Daniel built his camera for the next morning’s dive. The plan on the whiteboard said a sheltered bay known for frogfish and tiny nudibranchs, so he fitted his macro lens and sealed the housing on the salon table before bed. At half past five the next morning Rudi rubbed out the bay and wrote Manta Point in its place. The tide had turned in their favor, and the mantas were likely to be cleaning. Opening a housing on a rolling deck in the damp before dawn is how cameras flood, and Daniel knew it. But leaving the camera on the boat felt worse, so he dove with the macro lens. Four mantas circled the cleaning station for most of the dive, so close that his frame filled with the white edge of a wing or the curve of a gill slit and nothing else. He came up with 212 photographs,s and he didn’t want to keep any. Not one. From then on he left the housing open until after the morning briefing. The mantas came back on the last morning, and he had the right lens.
He still isn’t sure the close-ups were as bad as he thought that day.
Slack Water
The diving itself followed the tide more closely than anything Daniel had done before. Scuba divers at Komodo Island sites find that the famous spots are famous partly because of the current, which feeds the reefs and draws in the big animals. It also makes them unworkable at the wrong hour. A good Komodo liveaboard and diving crew time each entry for slack water between tides, when the reef is busy and the current has eased for a while.
- Mantas at cleaning stations, most reliable when the tide was right.
- Reef walls that the crew would only take guests along at slack, since the same wall an hour later could sweep a diver off it in seconds.
Short digression. The boat carried a ginger cat called Mangga that slept on the coiled anchor line every afternoon and ignored everyone except the cook. Daniel took more photographs of the cat than he’d admit to, including one of it asleep on a stack of dive logs. It’s the only picture from the trip his mother has asked to have printed.
Evenings at Anchor
By late afternoon the boat had usually reached the bay where it would spend the night, chosen as carefully as the dive sites for shelter from the wind. And the evenings were the slowest part of the day, with dinner on deck and the islands going dark around the boat. Fruit bats crossed the sky above one anchorage at dusk in long, loose lines, heading for the mangroves on a larger island. Daniel sat up most nights sorting photographs on his laptop until the generator went off at ten (the crew ran it for the cabin air conditioning and little else).
Getting There
Most travelers fly from Bal into Labuan Bajo. Some prefer to sail the whole way, and a Komodo liveaboard from Bali takes several days to work east along the chain of islands before reaching the park.
- Book in the dry months, roughly April to November, when the seas are calmest.
- Ask how the boat plans its days around the tides.
- Pack a thicker wetsuit for the southern sites.
- Bring a light jacket for the evenings on deck.
- Leave a spare day at the end before any flight, because the sea doesn’t always return guests on time.
For photographers, the most useful habit costs nothing. Leave the camera housing open until the morning briefing is over.
