Malta

MV Pippo

A stubby concrete-hulled tuna boat sitting upright on clean sand at around 35 metres off Malta's north-eastern tip, reached only by boat and enjoyed in short, tidy bites.

Deep / Experienced🚢 Wreck30 to 36 mBoat divePopularity: lowAlso called Pippo, Pippo wreck

Plan this dive

Sea conditions

Excellent right now

Flat, sheltered and calm

Forecast for the site, updated 01:47 AM

Waves: 0.3 m; from SE
Wind: n/a
Swell: 0.3 m; 5 s period
Sea temp: 29 °C

Next 7 days

Today🌤️82 0.5 m
0 N

Sat🌤️89 0.4 m
0 N

Sun🌤️93 0.3 m
0 N

Mon🌤️100 0.2 m
0 N

Tue🌤️87 0.4 m
0 N

Wed🌤️65 0.7 m
0 N

Thu🌤️68 0.7 m
0 N

Exposed to wind and swell from: N (0°), NE (45°), E (90°), SE (135°). An offshore site with nothing to hide behind. Anything with north or east in it puts chop on the surface and makes the shot line miserable. Visibility is usually excellent when the sea has been flat for a day or two. Best season: June to October, with September and early October giving the warmest water and the calmest mornings..

The dive

Pippo is the sort of wreck that rewards divers who like detail over drama. She is only about eighteen metres of workboat, so you can swim a full lap in a few minutes, which leaves the rest of your bottom time for poking around the clutter she still carries. Nobody stripped her before she went down, and that is the whole point of the dive: this is a working fishing vessel frozen mid-job rather than a sanitised artificial reef.

The descent is over open blue with nothing to look at until the hull resolves out of the haze somewhere around thirty metres. She sits upright and square on pale sand, which throws light back up at her and makes the silhouette pop nicely for photographers. Tuna cage gear is still lashed near the stern, winches and fittings are still in place, and the small openings amidships tempt penetration that most people wisely admire from the doorway.

Because she is compact and deep, the dive is naturally short. Most crews plan a single unhurried circuit, a look into the wheelhouse area, then a slow ascent with a safety stop hanging in the blue. Expect a big grouper to be watching you from under the hull at least once in every few visits, and expect the sand around her to be almost bare, which makes every crab and nudibranch on the steelwork feel like a find.

Conditions this far offshore are honest: no shelter, no bail-out shore, and a surface that can build quickly. It is a settled-weather dive, best done early when the sea is glassy and the boat traffic between Malta and Comino has not yet woken up.

A fishing boat left exactly as she sank, gear and all
Tuna cage equipment still attached at the stern
Upright, photogenic silhouette against bright sand
Rarely crowded, you will usually have her to yourselves
Resident grouper that likes to shadow visitors

Typical plan

Drop down the shot to the wheelhouse at roughly 30 metres, fin forward to the bow, then work down one side to the stern and the tuna gear at 33 to 35 metres. Circle back along the opposite rail, hover over the deck for a look into the openings without committing to a penetration, then return to the line by about eighteen minutes. Fifteen to twenty minutes of bottom time on air is realistic; nitrox 28 to 32 stretches it a little and softens the narcosis. Ascend the line with a three to five minute stop at five metres, and deploy a DSMB if you drift off it.

What the bottom looks like

1Bow of MV Pippo30 m deep · 34 m out
2Wheelhouse and small deck openings30 m deep · 44 m out
3Stern with tuna cage gear33 m deep · 58 m out
4Sand apron around the hull35 m deep · 62 m out
5Open sand plain, nothing beyond36 m deep · 85 m out

Cartoon cross-section along the usual route from the boat drop. Depths are approximate.

Flat, pale sand with almost no structure apart from the wreck itself.

Who you might meet

Getting in and staying safe

Boat only. Most crews leave from Mellieħa, Ċirkewwa or the Marfa area and run out past the headland in fifteen to twenty minutes. There is no shore option and no realistic surface swim, so you are on the skipper's schedule. Bring a delayed surface marker buoy and a torch, agree a pick-up plan before you splash, and have the boat stay close: this is open water with commercial and ferry traffic not far away.

Depth around 35 metres means narcosis and very short no-decompression limits
No shore exit and no shelter if the wind picks up
Ferry and fishing-boat traffic overhead, so a DSMB is not optional
Snagged fishing line and old netting on the superstructure
Tight, unmodified interior with silt and no purpose-cut exits
Current can run across the wreck in the channel
Low light at depth, torch needed to see any colour

A bit of history

Pippo was launched in 1976 at Marsa, built with an unusual concrete hull by the Vella yard working with Philip Formosa. She began life as a survey and research boat, was later refitted to carry passengers on cruises, and ended up in the hands of a local fisheries operator serving Malta's tuna penning industry. In October 2004 she was running back from Comino with a load of tuna when she began flooding and went down off Aħrax Point. Several salvage attempts came to nothing, and she has been left where she settled ever since, making her one of the very few modern Maltese wrecks that was never tidied up for divers.

Divers say

No reviews yet. First one gets bragging rights.

Further reading: Malta Dive Sites: MV Pippo · Wrecksite.eu entry for MV Pippo