Malta
Unknown Barge
A big unidentified barge sitting upright on sand at around 60 m off St Paul's Bay, close to the submarine HMS Stubborn. Flat and plain from outside, more interesting once you go in.
Sea conditions
Excellent right now
Flat, sheltered and calm
Forecast for the site, updated 01:45 AM
- Waves
- 0.4 m
- from ESE
- Wind
- n/a
- Swell
- 0.4 m
- 5 s period
- Sea temp
- 28 °C
Next 7 days
Exposed to wind and swell from: N (0°), NE (45°), E (90°), NW (315°). Open water north of St Paul's Bay with no shelter. Needs a calm forecast for the deco hang as much as for the boat ride. Visibility offshore here is usually good, often twenty metres plus, which makes the flat deck easier to navigate than it sounds. Best season: May to October, with the most reliable technical boat days from June to September.
The dive
From above it is exactly what it sounds like: a large flat deck, roughly sixty metres long and fifteen wide, lying on sand at fifty five to sixty metres with very little happening on top. Divers who stay outside tend to come up unimpressed, and they have a point. There are better wrecks at this depth if all you want is scenery.
The reason to come is the inside. The barge has an engine room and accommodation space that can be entered, and that is where the dive earns its keep. The catch is silt: the interior is heavily silted and only the first pair through will see anything, so agree the order before you descend and accept that whoever goes third is sightseeing in soup.
It is often run as a second target on a deep day out of St Paul's Bay, paired with HMS Stubborn nearby. Technical certification, decompression gases and a trimix mindset are the baseline, and the flat deck offers no shelter from current once you are off the structure.
- Genuine wreck penetration into an engine room and crew space
- Sits close to HMS Stubborn, so the two pair up on a technical day
- Big, upright and easy to navigate in the usually clear offshore water
- Unidentified, which leaves you free to speculate on the boat home
Typical plan
Shot descent to the deck at fifty five metres, then straight to whichever interior space the team wants while the silt is still down, first pair in and out before the next follows. Twenty to twenty five minutes bottom time, ending with a lap of the hull on the sand at sixty. Trimix for the bottom, at least one deco gas and preferably two, a DSMB for the ascent because the boat will not be over you by the end. Torch and backup for the interior, and a hard rule that nobody goes in behind a cloud.
What the bottom looks like
- 1Deck of the barge, flat and largely bare55 m deep · 30 m out
- 2Accommodation space, penetrable56 m deep · 55 m out
- 3Engine room, penetrable and very silty58 m deep · 75 m out
- 4Sand beside the hull at the deepest point60 m deep · 95 m out
Flat sand at around sixty metres, with the barge upright and its hull partly bedded in.
Who you might meet
Getting in and staying safe
Boat only, from St Paul's Bay, Bugibba or Mellieha, with a short run offshore. This is a technical charter dive: shot line, surface cover, staged deco. No shore alternative and nothing shallow nearby to use as a bail-out.
- Depth of 55 to 60 m, decompression mandatory
- Heavy silt inside the engine room and accommodation, near instant whiteout
- Overhead environment with restricted exits
- Narcosis on air, which is why trimix is the sensible choice
- Current in open water with no reef to shelter behind
- Corroded metal and collapsed internal structure
- Fishing nets and line snagged on the deck edges
- Boat traffic on the surface off St Paul's Bay in summer
A bit of history
The vessel has not been identified. It is recorded on wreck databases as an unknown barge off St Paul's Bay and sits in the same patch of seabed as HMS Stubborn, an S-class Royal Navy submarine damaged in 1945 and later expended as an ASDIC target off Malta in 1946. Barges and lighters were worked hard in Maltese waters during and after the war, and a fair number were simply abandoned or scuttled without a paper trail.
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Further reading: Malta Dive Sites: Unknown barge · Wrecksite: unknown barge off St Paul's Bay · Wrecksite: adjacent wreck record, St Paul's Bay · Atlantis Gozo: wreck diving in Malta