The condition of the wreck has of course change a lot. It is getting covered in algae and reckless divers have broken the windows and gauges that were nice details on the bridge. One has to ask oneself why one why one would bother with taking souvenirs from a scuttled wreck. The marine life is also more interesting now compared to what it used to be. Relatively large numbers of decent sized breams can be found and there is of course the standard cloud of damselfish.

The navigation out to the wreck is also easier now with two landmarks leading the way under water – first it is a plaque commemorating a British diver and then an anchor put in place by one of the local dive clubs. From there it is only a minute straight out to the wreck and the swim underwater is so easy that there is little reason to go for the surface swim option.

Overall I think the P29 is better now than it was at the time of sinking.

Caves or caverns?

Just to clarify my point of view – the difference between a cave dive and a cavern dive is that you can always see the exit and some daylight during a cavern dive. This is not the case during a cave dive which is one reason why cave diving is much more dangerous and requires a more redundant set-up.

Comino

Comino is located between Malta and Gozo and it is a popular dive site. Boat is the only way to access the dive sites so it is a bit less crowded than other sites such as Um el Faroud. The bad thing here is that there are loads and loads of tourists coming up on boats from Malta for the day. They are often taken around Comino in speed boats and the speed boat drivers are very reckless and have no concept at all that it might not be a good idea to hover above divers or stay away from an inflated SMB. All in all – on a good day Comino is absolutely beautiful.

Diving Comino Caves

So on to the dive. It is in fact a very easy dive with a maximum depth of 12 metres. One of the highlights of the dive is experienced just when you jump in and descend onto the sandy bottim below you at 6-7 metres. There are thousands of bream here and they have beed fed by divers and visiting tourists for what must be hundreds of fish generations. As soon as they see a diver they swim up to you to see if you have any bread. If you do you will have so much fish around you so you can’t even see your buddies. Biologically correct? Probably not. Fun? Certainly.

The caverns themselves are extremely nice – remember to go slowly and it is nice with a torch. A camera is also a good idea – you can take some amazing photos here. There is not so much life in the caverns themselves but it is a magic feeling being in them. The only drawback is that they are actually quite small. Any diver with a bit of experience (15-20 dives) can easily do these caves as you have access to the surface except for a few metres, also in the cavern. After exiting you swim around the edge of Comino and you are back with the fish in the bay.  Usually this takes about 30 minutes or so – it is almost difficult to do a really long dive here.

I really like this dive because of it’s simplicity. The cavern is great and the breams very nice to look at. The boat traffic is a big problem – it is not only unsafe it also creates lots of noise which kills the atmosphere quite a bit. The caves are also a bit too small if one should be picky. All in all this is a four star dive in my books.

This course is NOT a course in advanced diving opposite to what the name seems to suggest. It is still very much a beginners course but with some more elements added to the dives. Overall you can say that the Open Water course focuses on teaching the skills and basics of diving and this course is more about the experience of the dive.

Course structure and elective dives

The course is very differently structured compared to the Open Water course. The training is done during 5 Adventure Dives. 2 dives are compulsory – the Deep Dive and the Navigation Dive. The student then gets to choose 3 dives from a number of different dives. Options include:

• Underwater digital photography
• Boat diving
• Peak performance buoyancy
• Multilevel and computer diving
• Wreck diving
• Night diving
• Diving with underwater scooters
• Underwater Naturalist
• Project Aware
• Dry suit dive
• Search and recovery
• Nitrox
• Videography

A diver who has done 3 adventure dives can get certified as an Adventure Diver (which means absolutely nothing – a total waste of money). Upon completion of 5 adventure dives you get certified as an Advanced Open Water Diver and you are allowed to dive down to 30 meters.

Theory for PADI Advanced Open Water Diver

There is no written test for the AOW. Prior to each dive you read the chapter in the manual, complete the knowledge review and your instructor will go through the results and fill in any gaps you may have. That’s it. Often, unfortunately, this is sloppily done and the theoretical part is more of an excersise in order to not violate PADI standards. I think this is one of the major weaknesses of this course but more about that later.

Pool training

There is no pool training for AOW – everything is done in open water.

The Adventure Dives

So – the core of the course is the actual diving. This is not necessarily bad and correctly executed it will be a very good course in spite of the really weak theoretical requirements. The deep dive actually takes you down to about 30 meters and you get to do some pretty good skills that illustrates the problems with diving deeper.

The navigation dive can be good but is often very much a waste of time – it depends a lot on your instructor. Many students go through this without actually understanding why the should swim in a square or along a line. I think this is important but often this dive is simply ticked off in order to meet certification requirements. Not good.

Then we have the elective dives and here the quality varies greatly. The right instructor can make any dive very good but here you often see the lack of experience in instructors. I think that the general problem with AOW is that it is required much more experience from the instructors side than the OW. It is surprising how little some instructors know about decompression theory, marine life or history of the wrecks they are diving. Also – the PADI standards for these dives are ludicrously basic – for the wreck dive for example it is enough to simply swim around a wreck. What kind of development is that?

A good instructor and careful choice of the dives can make an excellent course. I like the triple Night diving, Multilevel diving and Peak Performance Buoyancy for example. If you live in colder countries Dry Suit is good. With a good instructor Naturalist can be excellent but it can be incredibly bad with the wrong one. Avoid Boat diving, Project Aware at any cost.

Conclusion

This is very much a hit and miss. I think new divers should do this course and it gives much more flexibility when going on dive trips. But beware – it is often taught by inexperienced instructors who are unable to do anything but carrying out the PADI standards which are way too lenient. You can pass through this course without actually learning anything and this is scary – I think that it is a big responsibility to dive to 30 metres and many people who are certified are not capable of doing this safely.

I disagree with the lack of a written test and I think it is done like this so it will be easier to sell. Perhaps this course should be more compared to “diving with a coach”. My conclusion is that most rookie instructors are unable to do a good AOW course – it takes lots of experience to be able to flesh out the poor standards and the course is often adapted to suit logistics rather than the students own needs.

So – do the course, but beware. Talk to your instructor beforehand and try to figure out if he or she actually knows anything about the topic they are teaching. Sounds scary? Welcome to the Scuba Diving Industry where you can go from total beginner to high ranking PADI Instructor in 8 months…

The wreck is pretty deep – 36-37 metres to the bottom and perhaps 31 metres on the main deck but that is understandable since the superstructure of the ship is very tall – at 15 metres you still have contact with the wreck. That said, due to the depth it is hardly a beginners dive.

I dived the wreck the day after the sinking and it is very interesting to see the development of her as a marine habitat and these days there is quite a lot of marine life on her. Unfortunately I have also had to see how some divers damage the wreck by smashing gauges and breaking the windows. Why do people do that?

I think this is a pretty good dive – it gets 3 stars in my books. The reason that it is not higher is that I find it hard to be extremely enthusiastic about scuttled wrecks but this is nice. In another 10 years I think it will be a much better dive when she has attracted more marine life and does not look quite as new.

Comments from a recent dive at P29 can be found here.

I have heard two different versions of her sinking and since I don’t know which one is the correct one I’ll include both. Version 1 is that she hit a mine while sweeping for mines during the siege of world war two. The other one is that she was damaged by italian aircraft and sunk in the Grand Harbour. After the war she was lifted and dumped off the Grand Harbour where she rests today. Out of the two versions I would vote for number two since I doubt that paddle steamers would be good at mine sweeping and another fact that supports her being moved is that the bow is missing and is not to be found anywhere near the wreck. Maybe the bow is still in the Grand Harbour?

This is a relatively advanced dive with a max depth of 41 metres and a min depth of 35 metres. The bottom is rocky and dark so there is not so much ambient light. I was not so impressed by the wreck after my first dive but since then it has grown into one of my favourites. I really like all the details – the hatch in the boiler room where you can squeeze in, the remains where the paddles used to be and the ammunition lying on the seafloor. It is also awesome that this is one of the best places in Malta to spot moray eels and conger eels.

I use this wreck alot for trimix training – it is a proper wreck dive with some challenges but the depth is moderate. I prefer doing it with oxygen as a decompresson mix but it can be done as a deep no stop dive although it becomes very short. About 20 to 25 minutes bottom time is usually good to see most of the wreck in peace and quiet.

This dive gets 5 stars in my book. The main contributing factors are the history, the details and the moray eels! I must admit that is is a rather biased and many people would argue that it should be scored lower.

The rudder of Hellespont. Note the absence of a propeller.

One wreck that is much more than a rumour is the Blenheim Bomber. She is very famous and has appeared in numerous dive magazines and it is one of the classic dives of Malta. Being a bomb plane she is much bigger than the fighter and the wreck is not upside down so it makes for an interesting dive. This plane was ditched in the sea after being damaged by German aircraft with no loss of human life.

Compared to the Bristol Beaufighter this is a deeper and darker dive. The bottom is not as bright and the visibility often less good. That said – she is very interesting. Unfortunately parts of her have been stolen by wreck looters and she deteriorates rather quickly. The depth is a problem – 42 metres is very deep for most divers and ascent and decent along a line requires good diving skills.

If you get a chance you should do this dive. She gets 4 stars in my rating which might seem low and she probably has scored higher but the stealing of parts has damaged the overall impression for me.

Le Polynesien is in fact a wreck from world war one which is rather unique in the waters around Malta. Although there were lots of action also at sea, WW1 was more land based than WW2. It was also the first war where submarines played a major role and the worlds navies were not well prepared to deal with this threat. At first the submarine war was carried out in a rather civilised way with submarines approaching ships while being fully visible and allowing the crews of the vessels to abandon the ship before sinking it with torpedoes. This was common in the Baltic Sea and some ships which were sunk like this are Direktor Reppenhagen, Nicomedia and Walter Leonhards who were all sunk in one day by the British submarine E19.

Even if the U-boats of the Imperial Navy are not well remembered by the historians today they nearly managed to win WW1 for Germany. A full account of the can be read at uboat.net, a site which has copious amounts of information about German submarines.

Le Polynesien was torpedoed outside Malta on the 10th of August 1918 supposedly by UC22 with a loss of 10 lives. The sources are very unclear about this and some rumours are that it was UB68 under the command of Karl Dönitz which was responsible for the sinking. It is also extremely hard to find much information at all about the sinking so I leave this question open. Up to the sinking Le Polynesien had sailed since 1890 and had she had been used as a troop ship during WW1 and was armed with guns at the bow and the stern.

She is an enormous ship – 152 metres long and has a design similar to that of the Titanic – a sleek hull with a very sharp bow.

Diving the Le Polynesien is hard to describe. The marine life is incredible and there are schools of groupers as well as a cloud of smaller fish. She is completely covered in corals and sponges and this makes it feel more like a tropical dive than one in the Mediterranean. And then there is of course the wreck. She is still in good condition with the bow and stern still standing and you can easily swim through the decks. The guns are standing and there are lots of plates and wine bottles around although many of them are unfortunately stolen by less considerate divers.

This is not an easy dive. First of all we have the depth – about 67 metres to the bottom. The top of the wreck is about 45 metres which is not too bad. Then we have the sheer size of her – she is simply too big to see in one dive and many divers have been carried away while diving her, seriously overstaying the planned bottom time. Finally, there are often very strong currents on her and getting swept away is very dangerous. Thus, I regard this as a technical dive and one that should be done with trimix rather than air although many locals here may have a different opinion.

Le Polynesien is one of these dives which can not be compared to any normal dive so I have given her Platinum status in my books. She is such a good dive so she is well worth a dive trip herself and to organise a technical dive week on only this wreck would not be a bad idea. If you get the chance to dive her – go for it. Few dives in the world will be as rewarding as this one!

Diver at the propeller

So – in spite of being a deliberately sunk wreck Um el Faroud does have a story to tell. While being repaired in the Malta drydocks in 1995 a gas explosion occured which killed 9 shipyard workers – a massive tragedy in a country as small as Malta. The explosion caused lots of structural damage and she was deemed unsuitable for any further commercial use so the opportunity came up to scuttle her to benefit the islands dive industry. The scuttling took place in September 1998.

She is massive – 110 meters long and with a height from the keel to the top of the funnel of 22 metres. A storm broke the wreck in two pieces a few years ago and she is gradually collapsing. That is in my opinion not a great problem – she was almost too intact before and she feels more like a “real” wreck when she is slightly damaged.

The marine life on the Faroud is often good. Big dentex are rather common, as are barracuda. You can almost always see lots of purple nudibranchs on here and this is also one of the two places where I have spotted dolphins underwater. Besides that there is always the usual cloud of damselfish and breams. In short – very nice.

Diving the Faroud can be rather tricky. It is a long swim from the entry point (perhaps 10 minutes) and some of it in blue water. There are currents which can change quickly and in addition to that, often rather poor visibility (20 metres or less most days). The depth is between 35 and 18 metres so that in combination with all other factors mean that it is very easy to use too much gas and not save enough for the way back. Unfit divers will struggle with the distance and if that is not enough the hill from the exit point to the car is very steep.

A wreck in this condition and size literally asks to be penetrated and it is very rewarding to do so. Some sections are relatively safe but one must be extremely catious in the lower areas where there is a very thick layer of slit. Do not go there without proper training or equipment.

If you want to get the most our of Faroud I strongly recommend a nitrox blend, 32% is pretty ideal. It takes away the stress of running low on both the NDL and on gas. Divers with high gas consumption should go for larger tanks as well.

I am not 100% sure what rating to give this dive but in the end it will be 5 stars. People travel far simply to do this dive and it is easy to understand why. She is huge and I have thoroughly enjoyed over 100 dives on her so she is well worth her stars!

The dive site is huge and not easily navigated so a compass is strongly recommended. You should also beware of the currents which can be rather strong from time to time.

Another magic feature of Ghar Lapsi is the cavern which is one of the prettiest in Malta. I have included some photos taken during the winter 2005. It is not very large and a tight squeeze in some places but well worth the effort. I really like to see the light falling in which creates superb effects.

The dive entry point at Ghar Lapsi

I give this site 4 stars – highy recommended.