Twenty Years of The Seven Seas

Anniversaries in yachting usually mean a repaint and a press release. The Seven Seas is marking her twentieth season differently: with her schedule close to full a year ahead, her original deckhands now standing watch as her captains, and her sails back on their yards for the first time in years. One of the great stories of Indonesian expedition cruising deserves telling properly.

Her founder wrote a letter to two decades of guests this season, and it is the rare anniversary note that reads like an adventure novel. What follows draws on it, with his words kept where nobody could put it better.

A Swim in 1982

The story starts with a hot, dusty hike to see the dragons of Komodo, and the swim that followed it. One look through a face mask at the reef below and the course of a life quietly changed. “It all started in the late 80s with a dream to tame the wild waters of Komodo,” he writes. In the years that followed, the reefs pulled him back again and again, across an archipelago where you could drop in almost anywhere and surface amazed.

Three Boats Before Her

The first boat came in 1991 and sank a year later north of Flores, “under somewhat mysterious circumstances while operating under my command!” as the letter cheerfully admits. The second, a sturdy Australian vessel that arrived in Labuan Bajo in 1997, became the proving ground: seasons of learning Komodo's fearsome currents well enough to turn them into exhilarating, safe diving, and of charting sites nobody had named.

Those years also seeded something larger. Together with a Dutch marine conservationist working in the park, the founder devised small patrol vessels they called floating ranger stations, moving rangers out to sea to confront blast fishing inside Komodo. The programme worked, and pieces of it still echo through the park's protection today. Then two bombs, in New York and in Bali, emptied the guest book, and the second boat went back to her owners.

A Hull With Nothing in It

The Seven Seas herself began as a bare cargo hull towed into Bali in 2005. No machinery, no shaft, no propeller, no paint. “She looked like a giant piece of grey, sun bleached driftwood!” The old crew was called back together, a head boatbuilder joined from the ranger station programme, and the team set about building what the founder describes as the infrastructure of a small town, on a boat. The main engine famously vanished from a delivery truck somewhere between Surabaya and Bali and has never been seen since.

In March 2006 she sailed for Komodo on her shakedown cruise. “Everything worked. All systems were go.”

Four Hundred Voyages

The twenty years since have carried her from Komodo to the Forgotten Islands, the Banda Sea, Triton Bay and Raja Ampat, through more than four hundred voyages. The letter's arithmetic is wonderful: over 250,000 scuba tanks filled, about as many meals served, more than two million plates and eight million cups washed by hand. Film crews, marine surveys, conservation expeditions and twenty years of families have all passed over her gangway.

The crew is the quiet record. Her two original deckhands, aboard since the 1990s, are both now qualified captains of The Seven Seas. Five cruise directors have each left their fingerprints on how a trip feels. One guest put twenty years of loyalty in a sentence: “I first came aboard Seven Seas when I was four years old. I hope that one day I can bring my own children to Indonesia, so they too can make beautiful memories with all of you.”

What the Sea Gave Back

Ask returning guests why they rebook and the answers are rarely about hardware. They are about sperm whales off Flores and hammerheads in the Banda Sea, about surfacing from a world-class dive with no other vessel on the horizon, about the easy rhythm a guest described this season as dive, relax, eat, dive again. Eastern Indonesia delivered, as the founder puts it, and the boat got better.

Her Sails Are Back

This year's dry dock went far beyond maintenance. Two guest cabins were rebuilt from bunks into proper doubles, part of a move to a standard maximum of fourteen guests that gives everyone more room while keeping the atmosphere of a shared expedition. And after years of motoring, her rig was restored: she was built as a traditional Buginese schooner, and she can spread her sails once again.

The founder gives the moment one line that needs nothing added: “And seeing those sails flying again feels pretty good.”

The Third Decade

Her calendar now fills a year or more ahead, split between private charters and her famous scheduled expeditions. For divers she remains one of the archipelago's great instruments, and our guides to the best diving in Indonesia and to diving in comfort map the waters she knows better than almost anyone. Share your preferred dates and we will gladly confirm availability.

Twenty years, four hundred voyages, one boat. The film below is not new. It was shot in her early years, which makes it the best possible proof: the wake, the diving and the welcome have not changed.