Manta Ray Bay
Yap, Micronesia
Why Manta Ray Bay Resort?
Manta Ray Bay Resort & Yap Divers is a small, family-owned, luxury hotel on the pristine island of Yap in the western Pacific Ocean – operating since 1986. Yap has a resident population of manta rays and several shallow cleaning stations where divers can see mantas year-round. In addition to manta ray diving, the resort loves taking their guests to dive among reef sharks, Mandarin, and brilliant coral reefs with macrofauna and caverns.
They are proud to have recently been voted by the readers of Diver Magazine UK as one of the top 25 dive resorts worldwide and the Reader’s Choice Award as the #5 dive resort in the Pacific/Red Sea/Indian Ocean. Serving only 1,000 divers a year, they offer their guests crowd-free dive sites and VIP service, spa treatments, home-brewed beer, and a unique bar/dining experience onboard their 100+ year-old Indonesian Schooner moored in front of the resort.
Diving Yap, Micronesia:
Yap is best known for its cultural beauty, picturesque village scenes, resident manta rays presence, clear blue water scuba diving, and a host of eco-tours and experiences.
With almost 100 miles of barrier reef, several big channels, and lagoon sites, there is one of everything here to explore – miles of outer reef wall diving, deep and shallow channels to drift as well as inner lagoon macro and night diving.
Highlights of Yap Diving are the mantas, daily year-round reef shark diving with three kinds of interactions, nightly mating mandarin fish as well as rich coral walls and caverns.
Yap Divers:
Award-winning Yap Divers is Yap’s first PADI 5-Star Resort and an SSI Platinum Dive Center.
With Yap Divers, you can be assured of clean, pure air, safe diving, and a full range of instruction available from Open Water through Divemaster. They also offer a number of specialty dive certifications for those who want to expand their formal dive training, and they are home to the only place in the world where you can do the PADI-certified Manta Ray Awareness Course. This makes for a perfect combination to enhance the Yap Island vacation.
The dive traveler is offered all that he or she could ever ask for in terms of dive experiences with regularly scheduled drift dives, wall dives, cavern dives, and night dives, as well as their specialty – Giant Manta dives.
Yap – Diving’s Best-Kept Secret
Although they have a host of charted dive sites and a program to discover more dive destinations, the fun part is that more than 50% of Yap’s reefs remain unexplored. It is often said that Yap is “World Class Diving’s Best Kept Secret”.
The Manta Ray Bay Resort was built FOR divers, BY divers. Their harborside dive center, Yap Divers, has everything you’d expect from a PADI 5-star facility, SSI Platinum Dive Center, and so much more. Yap Divers is a full-service facility with modern boats, rental gear, a dive shop, camera bays, gear rinse, and storage. Yap Divers dives all sites around Yap on a daily basis with up to 5 dives per day offered to their guests.
Plus, at the end of an unforgettable day of diving, it’s nice to know that there are only a few dozen steps or so from the quay to your room or the bar aboard the S/V Mnuw, the resort’s 100-year-old South Seas Schooner.
Private Tropical Beach:
Manta Ray Bay Resort has a private beach on the northern island of Ma’ap where you can enjoy a cliché gold sand coconut tree beach with an emerald lagoon.
On Yap, you can spend all day on a private beach with your partner, dive buddy, or group in the village with no one else around. They arrange private beach trips, group events, parties, and BBQs.
Get the best of the island in a lush tropical setting, all to yourself.
At any time during your stay with them, they can set you up with a few excursions or a whole day on the beach with food, beer, wine, drinks, beach towels, kayaks, and more.
Group events and tour leaders can organize surface interval lunch breaks in between dives and flight day beach parties – ask the resort to help spice up your week with some time on their private beach.
Services and facilities:
Taro Leaf Spa:
The Taro Leaf Spa was opened in February 2009 and takes the best of everything that is Yapese to bring you an experience that will relax, energize, invigorate, revitalize, and harmonize you. The decor of the spa is based on island themes and all of their products use locally sourced plants.
This spa has a welcoming reception and waiting area, which is filled with exotic fragrances. You will be given your own Taro Leaf robe and shorts to change into in their comfortable change area. Each guest will have their own private locker to keep valuables secure.
There are two treatment rooms. Frangipani is named after a beautiful fragrant flower that grows in abundance around the island. This room has two massage beds, so it is ideal for two friends to have treatments at the same time. The wooden paneling and abundance of flowers make this room feel at one with nature. Kokoris, named after the white ginger flower that grows on the island, is the second treatment room, which has a massage bed and a stone bath, Almeria. This bath is hewn from one piece of solid rock and polished to a smooth finish. This room opens out into the private garden with a relaxing waterfall to make the whole setting feel very tranquil.
A wide range of treatments are available, so there is really something to meet everyone’s needs, whether you have tiered muscles from a day’s diving or you just want to pamper yourself for a few hours.
The Mnuw: Ship’s Bar & Grill:
The Mnuw is the most unique restaurant and bar in Micronesia if not the world. She is a 170ft (55m) Phinisi schooner from Indonesia with 3 dining decks, 2 bars, and her kitchen all on board. Start your day with a gorgeous sunrise during breakfast. Or unwind after a full day of activities with a cold beer or tropical beverage while swapping sea stories.
The Manta Ray Restaurant:
Imagine, rough-hewn beams and floors, teak walls, wall sconces, cozy nooks, the wooden aroma and decoration of times gone by, and intimate lighting, now you can “feel” their Restaurant.
Located on the main deck of the “SV Mnuw”, their very own hundred-year-old South Seas Schooner, enjoy the fine view through panoramic windows and then let them pamper you.
Genuine Microbrewery:
Typically, when you visit a tropical paradise one expects that the “local brew” is always a little less than satisfying, lacking in taste/richness, and even sometimes downright undrinkable. Not so in Yap!
Enter Stone Money Brewing Company, Yap’s own genuine microbrewery. There is even a Swiss brewmaster! With its climate-controlled brewing facility and high-quality ingredients, you would be hard-pressed to find a better tropical microbrewery.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.