SeaFamiliaSea Familia — home

Since 2018

One boat, one loan, and a very long list

We are Sea Familia — a company, a group, whose mission is to be your family in your home away from home. Through a liveaboard trip or more, dive or no dive, aboard our flagship vessels KLM Sea Familia I & KLM Sea Familia II, whose dive operations are run by our one and only Sea Familia Dive Academy.

History

Brief History and Current Developments

Sea Familia’s story is built on the kinship and togetherness our founder felt on his first liveaboard dive trip in 2018. That experience deepened his love of the ocean and led him to build the original Sea Familia, KLM Sea Familia I, in 2019.

Starting from that simple experience, Sea Familia began its journey legally under PT. Famindo Wisata Bajo, and has since grown into a bigger group — with the Sea Familia Dive Academy, KLM Sea Familia II, and KLM Sea Familia III, which is still being built. When the time comes, we’ll introduce you to Sea Familia III.

What we hold to

Four things we will not trade

01

A crew that stays

Trained in-house and paid through the off season rather than hired by the week. It is the single largest line in our costs and the reason guests remember names.

02

Human language

No “pax”, no “units”, no “F&B”. You are guests, they are meals, and the boat is a she. It sounds small until you notice how much else follows from it.

03

The captain decides

Not the itinerary PDF, not the office, not a guest who has read a forum. Weather and current win, every time, and we say so before you book.

04

Local first, always

Every one of our twenty-five people is Indonesian, most from the islands we sail, and the boats were built by a family we have known for generations.

Sustainability

What we actually do, and what we do not

We are a company that burns diesel to take people to remote reefs. Calling that eco-tourism would be a lie, so here is the honest version: a list of specific things, some of which are inconvenient, and one thing we have not solved.

37%
of nautical miles last season made under sail rather than engine. We publish this figure each year, and it went down in 2024 — the wind was poor and we did not pretend otherwise.
Zero
single-use plastic bottles on any boat since 2019. Filtered water, refillable steel flasks, and a watermaker on both hulls.
14
reef-monitoring plots surveyed monthly by our own crew, with the data going to Dr. Moerdani's group at no charge to anyone.
4%
of every fare goes to the village funds in the anchorages we use most — decided by the villages, not by us, and audited annually.

The part we have not solved

Your flights. A return from Europe to Labuan Bajo emits several times more than your entire trip on board, and no amount of solar panels on our sun deck changes that arithmetic. We do not sell offsets, because we do not believe the ones available are worth what they cost. What we do instead is encourage longer stays on the ground before or after you sail, rather than a single quick trip.

On the villages

We visit a handful of communities regularly and we arrive when they say to arrive. Nobody performs a welcome. Nobody dances unless there is a reason to dance. Guests are asked to put the camera down for the first hour, which almost everyone finds harder than the diving.

Meet the familia

Twenty-five people, two of them here

You will meet the rest on board, which is rather the point. These two are the ones you are most likely to correspond with first.

Bimo Santoso

Co-founder

Bira, South Sulawesi

Grandson of a Konjo shipwright. Signed the loan for Familia Satu at 29 and still checks every hull himself.

Ratih Santoso

Co-founder

Labuan Bajo

Ran the office out of a spare room for three years. Handles every charter enquiry personally, which is why they take a day.

Ayu Prasetya

Cruise director

Labuan Bajo

Learned the currents from her uncle’s outrigger at fourteen. Has logged over four thousand dives in the Flores Sea.

Captain Yos Tanuwijaya

Master, Bintang Laut

Ambon

Twenty-two Banda crossings. Will change the day’s plan for a good breeze and make no apology.

Rudi Hartawan

Head cook

Makassar

Cooks for sixteen with no gimballed stove. Buys whatever the market had, which is why the menu is written at 6am.

Dr. Lila Moerdani

Marine biologist

Bogor

Joins four crossings a season as guest lecturer. Runs the reef-monitoring plots the crew survey each month.

We hire from the islands we sail

Deckhands, cooks, engineers, dive guides. No experience required for deck crew — we train, we pay through the off season, and we would rather teach someone from Komodo than import someone from Bali.

Ask about crewing

Come and see whether any of this is true

Everything on this page is easy to write and harder to do. The only test that matters is three nights on a boat, so start there.

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