From warship to luxury explorer: The Aqua Blu story

I’ve been a passenger on quite a few ships of late – cruise ships, icebreakers, former Russian research vessels and ships that have ranged in age from just a year or two to being decades old.

I’m aware that over the course of often long maritime lives, ships can be bought and sold, they can have their names changed, their purposes altered and be given various tech upgrades and internal and external refits. As a rule, I never cared much for what a ship used to be, only what it is now.

A few months ago, that all changed. For the first time, I found myself wanting to know how a ship came to be what it is in the present, what its prior lives had been, and its journey through those inevitable refits and rebrands.

Ships are a little like people. We all get older every day, and to know someone properly, it helps to know a little about their often complicated past. Why should a ship be any different?

Take the MV Aqua Blu, for example. Over its lifetime, it’s undergone a dizzying array of refits, a reimagining that has taken it from a proud workhorse of the British Royal Navy to the status of enviable superyacht, a transformation from beast to the most enviable of beauties.

Its current owner, Aqua Expeditions, is a small ship cruise company offering bespoke itineraries to some of the world’s most romantic and adventure-filled destinations, including the Galapagos Islands, the Peruvian Amazon, the Mekong Delta and the islands of Indonesia. Their ships are unmatched in style, the ultimate in luxury and refinement.

Based in Eastern Indonesia, the five-deck, 15-suite luxury, long-range explorer ship Aqua Blu looked to me like it had been a superyacht from the day it was born.

I saw Aqua Blu for the very first time at anchor in the waters off Sorong in West Papua as its crew prepared to take me on a seven-night journey through the 1,500-island archipelago of Raja Ampat – home to more than a thousand species of tropical fish and 600 species of hard coral, a scuba and/or snorkeling tour-de-force in the midst of one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems.

The evolution of a navy ship

The ship began its life as a British naval explorer, HMS Beagle, one of four Bulldog-class survey vessels constructed in the 1960s and the last British Royal Navy ship to be built with wooden decks.

Designed to collect hydrographic data on the world’s oceans, a 1990 refit upgraded its surveying abilities, and it was redeployed to British waters, where it played a part in revolutionizing the science of underwater surveying.

The finest ship now sailing East Indonesian waters was decommissioned in February 2002 before being purchased just a month later by an English couple who saw its potential as a broad-beamed charter vessel.

In 2005, with the help of dozens of craftsmen, designers and naval architects, they converted it into an 11-cabin luxury yacht, reduced her superstructure from five decks down to four, and rechristened it Titan. But its evolution didn’t end there.

In 2008, Titan was purchased again, this time by an Italian aristocratic family who further enhanced its superyacht status with new stairs, a new sundeck and Jacuzzi, upgraded the galley and installed a new wooden floor in the upper salon.

By 2014, it was being chartered for around US$249,172 a week and was regularly moored alongside the sort of ships you see at anchor in places like Monaco, Cannes or St Tropez. Titan was the sort of ship I never thought, in my wildest dreams, I’d ever see the inside of, much less be a guest.

The ship was remodeled yet again in 2019, this time by none other than the famous Dutch mega-star yacht designer Cor Rover and delivered to its current owners, Aqua Expeditions.

Rover, who was born on a river barge to a water-loving family, gave the ship’s teak interiors a new shine, complementing its brass and ivory-themed interior and added soft lighting and pastel colors.

Its cabins became plush sanctuaries of silence and solitude, its sun deck a resplendent space with sunbeds, a wraparound lounge and a well-stocked refrigerator, and it boasted a 1:1 crew-to-guest ratio, which means everything you need you will have, sometimes even before you realize you need it.

The wonders of Raja Ampat

Yet you come to Raja Ampat, the world’s most diverse, most beautiful Marine Protected Area, not because you’re desperate to live for a while on a superyacht, but because you love to do one or both of two things: scuba dive and snorkel.

Of the 22 guests on this trip, eight were divers, but note that if you decide to dive and don’t have your PADI certificate, you’d best get it prior to your trip.

We visited some of Raja Ampat’s most legendary coral reefs, including Melissa’s Garden, Cape Kri and Eddy’s Black Forest off Wofoh Island. We also, of course, dropped anchor at Wayag.

Wayag is a wonderland, a largely uninhabited 155,000-hectare expanse of bullet-shaped karst limestone mountains that overwhelms with its beauty. We arrived before breakfast and, wasting no time with everyone in agreement that “breakfast can wait”, we hopped into Aqua Blu’s two 16-seat Alson launch boats and cruised among its islands.

After breakfast, we were out again for a mid-morning swim off one of its beaches, followed by an afternoon visit to a local ranger station, where we stood in knee-deep water while black-tipped reef sharks swam around our legs.

When we weren’t swimming, dining or lounging on the finest sundeck for a thousand miles, we were going ashore in search of the red bird-of-paradise with its gorgeous crimson plumes, or floating downstream in an emerald-colored jungle creek during an intense tropical rainstorm.

Every other day down in our underwater worlds, we swam through schools of blackfish, saw manta rays, glimpsed species of fish we never knew existed, such as crocodile fish, and snorkeled alongside walls of fan corals that grow closer to the surface here than almost anywhere else.

At the end of each perfect day, the dining – mostly outdoors – was impeccable, with more than 160 recipes crafted by Australian chef Benjamin Cross.

In August 2025, Benjamin will be aboard Aqua Blu on a chef-hosted trip through the islands of Komodo National Park in East Indonesia, serving the sort of cuisine that Aqua Blu has become known for: 48-hour beef short rib rendang, Javanese prawns in oil and lime, Balinese suckling pig and handline-caught fish grilled in Balinese sambal.

Indonesia is a beguiling archipelago, home to more than 700 languages. Not dialects, but distinct, standalone languages. One of our crew was from Sulawesi and told me that if someone from Bali said “Good morning” to him, he wouldn’t know what he said because “Good Morning” in Sulawesi is so different.

There is so much diversity in this region, not just in its flora, fauna and coral reefs, but in its languages and customs across its 18,000 islands. The fact that the country manages to function as a coherent nation as well as it does is a miracle all on its own.

Indonesia and Aqua Blu might at first glance seem an unlikely duo, but the truth is they share an unlikely bond. Both began as something else. A former jumble of island kingdoms, federations and warrior clans constantly reinventing itself, being explored by a ship that is itself a product of endless reinvention, inevitably, serendipitously now finding itself exactly where it was always meant to be.