Beneath the surface
Top 10 dive sites
HMS Stubborn – ‘S Class’ submarine – upright on the sand in 54 metres of water out of St. Paul’s Bay.
SS Imperial Eagle – car ferry – upright on the sand in 40 metres of water off Qawra Point.
Cominetto Reef – reef and wall dive – from eight metres it offers superb marine life.
Blue Hole, Gozo – a well dived but magical site with caves, grottoes and splendid underwater scenery.
Blenheim Bomber – wreck of a World War II aircraft 40 metres deep.
Cirkewwa – Wreck of the Tugboat ‘Rozi’ and wall diving sites from 10 to 40 metres.
Devil’s Reef – cave at 30 metres with stalactites and superb predatory marine life.
SS Um el Faroud – wreck of a large tanker in 30 metres of water off Wied iz Zurrieq.
Coral Grotto – small inland sea with much coral and marine life in six metres of water.
Comino Caves – highlight of the dive is to feed shoals of large two-banded bream at the entrance to the caves.
David Oldale is a regular visitor to Malta’s underwater world
I kept my eyes on the ‘echo sounder’ – the sand-seabed levelled at 50 metres, some three miles out of St Paul’s Bay. Clive, our skipper, cut the power on the twin Johnson’s as the outline of what could be nothing other than a large wreck showed on the screen.
I rolled back over the side of the boat into the flat calm of a warm, clear sea and disappeared below the surface. At a depth of 30 metres I was surrounded by a deep blue as shimmering beams of sunlight cascaded down from the surface way above. Some 40 metres now, my exhaled breath glugged through a seemingly soup-like thickness of water from my regulator. As I descended further I could eventually make out what is every diver’s dream – the long forgotten wreck of an intact submarine.
HMS Stubborn (an ‘S’ class Submarine that saw considerable action in World War II) had been scuttled in 1946 by the Royal Navy and now it lies upright on a flat seafloor, it’s conning tower pointing defiantly toward the surface. Classified now as an artificial reef, Stubborn rates as one of the best sites in the Mediterranean for exploration by experienced divers.
I dropped onto the sand below the sharp rake of the bow, the closed torpedo tube doors lay just above my head. I could not spend too long at this depth as my ‘dive computer’ was showing I had just two minutes left before the dive would require lengthy decompression stops. Just time for a quick fin down along the hull to the after planes and twin screws before the required slow ascent to the surface. I straddled the ‘decompression-trapese’ at six metres for my first ‘stop’ for three minutes and considered the dive. Few words could describe it adequately. It had just been amazing.
The afternoon dive was off the island of Comino on Cominetto Reef. With my maximum depth limited to 20 metres this was more suited to less experienced divers. Here the reef weaved its jagged path out from the island into the Malta/Gozo Channel, venturing to within eight metres of the surface but dropping far beyond safe diving limits. I had expected an easy and somewhat boring dive in comparison to the morning venture, but I had somehow forgotten that I was diving around the Maltese islands. At 20 metres within the confines of the reef I became suddenly aware that my dive buddies had backed away from me. Looking up to the surface of the water I soon realised why as a swiftly moving wall of silver was gliding down upon and around me.
A shoal of 400 plus barracuda enclosed me within their predatory cloud and schools of bream and damsels sped as one in varying directions as the barracuda dashed in to feed.
I floated transfixed in mid-water amazed but not surprised – this was after all Malta, ‘the jewel in and under the Mediterranean’!
Why Malta?
Its unique position centred in the Mediterranean offers crystal clear, unpolluted, warm water.
No matter what the weather, a lee shore ensures calm seas all year.
Being government regulated, facilities and diver safety are not bettered anywhere else in the world.
Malta has everything for the very experienced to trainee diver – wrecks, underwater caves/caverns and wall diving with marine life on par with the best in the Mediterranean.
Underwater visibility varies between a 20 and 40 metres, with water temperatures ranging from a moderate 13ºC to a warm 26ºC.
There are some 70 qualified and approved diving centers on the Maltese islands.
Did you know?
The Maltese islands are surrounded by some 400 known drive sites.