Malta
HMS Justified
A 90 metre trimix target out in the old Grand Harbour minefield ground, and easily the thinnest paper trail on the whole Malta list. Very few people have dived it and almost nothing about it is written down.
Sea conditions
Good right now
Some chop (0.5 m E)
Forecast for the site, updated 01:45 AM
- Waves
- 0.5 m
- from E
- Wind
- n/a
- Swell
- 0.5 m
- 5 s period
- Sea temp
- 29 °C
Next 7 days
Exposed to wind and swell from: N (0°), NE (45°), E (90°), SE (135°), S (180°). Open ground with nothing to hide behind. Anything from the northern half of the compass, and the gregale in particular, will stop this dive before it starts. You want a flat, windless morning with a settled forecast, because getting caught on a decompression schedule in a building sea is the worst outcome here. Best season: Late May to early October, when the sea is warmest and calm windows last for days rather than hours..
The dive
Let us be straight with you: this one is a question mark. The name belongs to the fleet of small Admiralty drifters that Malta pressed into minesweeping during the siege years, working the swept channels outside Valletta with acoustic and magnetic gear rigged onto fishing boats that were never designed for the job. A drifter called Justified turns up in accounts of that acoustic sweeping work alongside boats like Girl Margaret and Ploughboy. What is missing is a published account tying that vessel to this mark on the seabed.
What the mark itself promises is standard for the ground east of Valletta. Flat sand and mud at ninety metres, a small steel or timber hull sitting on it, decent visibility because nothing stirs the bottom down there, and the cool, blue, slightly gloomy light that makes a hundred metre dive in Malta feel more like an expedition than a day out.
Plan it as a genuine trimix project rather than a site visit. At ninety metres you get maybe twenty minutes of usable bottom time for well over an hour of decompression, and the only sensible way to spend that is a slow circuit of a very small object. Go in expecting to add to the record rather than read from it, and bring a camera.
- One of the last genuinely unknown quantities in Maltese wreck diving
- Ninety metres of quiet, blue, undisturbed water
- A chance to photograph something almost nobody has seen
- Part of the Valletta minesweeping story that gets far less attention than the big warships
Typical plan
Trimix only. Figure on about fifteen to twenty minutes on the bottom at ninety metres, a single unhurried lap of a small hull, then a staged ascent of an hour and a quarter or more on decompression gases, typically a fifty percent nitrox and pure oxygen. Shoot a bag from the wreck and drift the deco if there is any movement in the water. Twin bottom stages, redundant lighting, backup computer and a boat that will not leave you.
What the bottom looks like
- 1Small hull on the bottom, reported unverified88 m deep · 20 m out
- 2Flat sand and mud around the wreck90 m deep · 45 m out
- 3Scattered debris trail90 m deep · 70 m out
Flat, fine sand going to silty mud, the sort of bottom that clouds instantly if you fin it and takes an age to settle.
Who you might meet
Getting in and staying safe
Boat only, and a properly equipped one. The site lies a few kilometres off the Valletta coast in open water with shipping moving in and out of Grand Harbour, so you want a skipper who will stay on station, fly the correct flag and watch traffic for the full run of decompression. There is no shore option and no shallow bail-out. If the wreck is later identified as a protected war grave it will fall under the Heritage Malta permit system, so ask your centre to check the status before you book anything.
- Ninety metres: full trimix decompression dive with a long obligation and no shortcuts
- Open water with commercial traffic running to and from Grand Harbour
- Poorly documented target, so no reliable shot placement and possible dry runs
- Snagged fishing line and old netting are common on wrecks in this ground
- Cold and dark at depth compared with the shallow sites, with real thermoclines
- Long open water decompression that needs a surface marker and a patient boat
A bit of history
During 1942 the approaches to Grand Harbour were mined repeatedly by German and Italian fast attack craft, and Malta answered with a scratch force of requisitioned drifters and motor launches rigged for sweeping. Several of them were blown up doing it, which is why the seabed off Valletta now holds a cluster of small minesweeping casualties at depths from fifty to a hundred metres. A drifter named Justified served in that Malta sweeping effort. Whether this mark is her, and when and how she was lost, is not something we could confirm from published sources.
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Further reading: Malta Dive Sites listing for HMS Justified · Battlefront Malta on wartime minesweeping around Malta · Malta Command Admiralty War Diary 1942