A German fast attack boat said to lie in about 90 m of open water off Valletta and Sliema, with no confirmed identity, no published survey and no dive report anywhere. The position is a rumour that has been copied forward for years rather than a verified wreck.
WreckDivers rarely, if ever, come here.
We found no record of anyone diving this site. It is charted so the picture of what lies under the water is complete, not because it is a place to go: there is no set route, no local briefing to lean on, and nothing on this page has been proven in the water.
Sea conditions
Stay dry right now
Sea is up (3.2 m NW) · Fresh W wind (41 km/h) · Gusts to 58 km/h
Done for today. Tomorrow: not looking good. Best it gets is 17 at 17:00: Sea is up (1.3 m NW)
Forecast for the site, updated 19:45 · Models disagree
Measured at Fort St Elmo (7.7 km away, 20:29): 35 km/h from W, gusts 40. The next hours lean on it.
- Waves
- 3.2 m
- from NW, biggest 5.1
- Wind
- 41 km/h
- W, gusts 58
- Swell
- 0.9 m
- 10 s period
- Sea temp
- 22 °C
- air 19 °C
Hour by hour
Next 7 days
0 3.2 m54 W
0 3.1 m53 WNW
47 0.9 m21 WNW
82 0.5 m15 ESE
66 0.6 m14 E
65 0.6 m22 NE
72 0.5 m21 E
Sunrise 06:24, sunset 17:05
Waves: Copernicus Med-Waves 4 km + MFWAM 8 km + EWAM 5 km + ECMWF WAM 9 km. Wind: ICON-2I 2 km + ECMWF IFS 9 km + ICON-EU 7 km + UKMO 10 km + ARPEGE 11 km. Read a few km out on the side the site is open to, then blended.
Exposed to wind and swell from: N (0°), NE (45°), E (90°), SE (135°). Open sea about five kilometres off the northeast coast of Malta. Land lies west and southwest, so a southerly or westerly blows offshore and leaves the surface workable, while anything from north round to southeast arrives with unlimited fetch and ends the day. Swell matters more than wind strength when the plan involves an hour of drifting deco, so judge it on the sea state forecast and be happy to call it off on the slipway. Best season: Late May to early October, and only on the genuinely flat days in that window.
The dive
Two Schnellboote of the 3rd S-Flotilla were lost off Malta in May 1942, and only one of them, S-31, has ever been properly found. This marker is the ghost of the other one. The coordinates and the 90 m depth attached to it line up precisely with a rumoured position for S 34 that circulates among S-boat historians, so the honest description is not a wreck at all but a bearing that somebody once passed on.
If a boat of that class really is down there it would be an S 30 type: about 32.8 m long and 5 m in the beam, 81 tonnes, three Daimler-Benz diesels, twenty one men, two 53.3 cm torpedo tubes forward and a 20 mm cannon, capable of 36 knots on a flat night. The hulls were light metal framing planked in wood, so on the sister boat S-31 the planking has gone and the frames, engines, shafts and tubes stand bare. Expect the same here at best, and a much more broken picture at worst, since S 34 was blown up by her own scuttling charges and then finished off by a bomb the next day.
So this is not a dive you book. It is a target for someone with a sounder, a lot of patience and a reason to look, and every hour spent over it is an hour of trimix planning for a hole in the water that may hold nothing. Nobody has published a photograph, a sketch, a depth check or a dive account, and the site index itself lists it as never dived.
If you want a Schnellboot in Malta and you want to actually see one, S-31 sits upright at around 65 m off Xghajra with her weaponry in place and is booked through approved centres. Come back to this one when somebody produces proof.
- The second of Malta's two lost Schnellboote, still officially missing
- A rumoured position rather than a known wreck, which is either the appeal or the reason to skip it
- Around 90 m of open water with no shelter, so a full trimix expedition
- The documented alternative, S-31 at 65 m, is the one you can actually dive
Typical plan
Treat it as a search, not a dive. Spend the morning running the sounder over the rumoured box before anyone kits up, and only shot a contact that looks like a thirty metre target on flat ground. If you get one, a hypoxic bottom mix for around 90 m, fifteen to twenty minutes on the bottom to swim the length once and film everything, then a staged ascent on two or three deco gases with a drifting hang under a DSMB and better than ninety minutes of run time. Twinset with stages or a rebreather with full bail-out, two divers minimum plus a competent surface team, redundant lights and something that records. If the sounder finds nothing, that is a result too, and a cheaper one than a bounce to ninety metres of sand.
What the bottom looks like
- 1Base of the shot line on soft sand and mud90 m deep · under the boat
- 2Expected bow area with torpedo tube mountings, unconfirmed90 m deep · 16 m from the boat
- 3Expected midships, the engine space that took the shell90 m deep · 36 m from the boat
- 4Expected stern with three shafts and rudders90 m deep · 54 m from the boat
- 5Likely debris trail from the scuttling charges and the bomb90 m deep · 71 m from the boat
- 6Open sand and mud, nothing to hold on to88 m deep · 86 m from the boat
Soft sand and mud at around ninety metres, the kind that silts out fast and takes a light hull down into itself.
Who you might meet
Almost always
Often
Marked ones can hurt you. What they do and what to do about it is under Getting in and staying safe.
Getting in and staying safe
Only for serious professionals who know exactly what they are doing. With no record of anyone diving here there is no one to ask and no set route, so treat every line below as the start of your own planning, not a briefing. Plan it as an expedition, not a dive.
Boat only, and in practice expedition only. The nearest sensible departures are Sliema, Msida and the Grand Harbour marinas, twenty to thirty minutes out. No Maltese centre runs this as a scheduled trip because there is nothing confirmed to run to, so getting here means chartering a boat with a decent echo sounder, searching, and only then dropping a shot. Anything that does turn out to be a wartime wreck is protected under Malta's underwater cultural heritage rules, so report it to Heritage Malta rather than souveniring it. Budget for a skipper who will hold station for two hours while the team hangs on deco, and for surface cover that can pick up divers who surface a long way downwind.
- Around 90 m if the rumour is right, which means hypoxic trimix, staged deco and a run time well past ninety minutes
- The position is unverified, so the shot may land on bare sand and the dive becomes a very expensive bounce
- Open water with no shelter and no shallow bail-out, all the way from the shot to the surface
- Current that often runs differently at depth than it does on the surface here
- Busy shipping and ferry lanes on the approach to Grand Harbour, so a big flag and alert cover are not optional
- Narcosis and cold on a long bottom phase, with light failing below 60 m
- Snagged monofilament and nets are normal on deep Maltese wrecks
- If a scuttled and bombed hull is found it will be unstable and sharp, with no safe penetration anywhere
- Human remains are possible on any S-boat wreck, so treat anything you find as a grave until told otherwise
Marine life to respect
Blackbelly rosefish · Ċippullazza tal-għajn Can hurt you
Venomous spines, like a scorpionfish. Do not handle it; hot water if stung.
Conger eel · Gringu Can hurt you
Crushing bite if a hand goes into its hole. Look in from a distance and keep fingers out.
A bit of history
The 3rd S-Flotilla moved to Sicily at the end of 1941, working from Augusta and later Porto Empedocle, and spent the winter and spring mining the approaches to Grand Harbour and hunting the convoys feeding Malta. In roughly two dozen operations the flotilla laid over five hundred mines in Maltese waters. It cost them two boats. On the night of 9 to 10 May 1942 S-31 set off a drifting mine near the harbour entrance and went down with heavy loss of life, and she is a war grave. A week later, on the night of 16 to 17 May 1942, S 34 was caught in the searchlights while laying another barrier close inshore and took a coastal artillery shell straight into her engine room. Three men were killed. S 59 came alongside under smoke, lifted off the survivors and the secret papers, and the scuttling charges were fired, but the gunfire from shore meant nobody saw her sink. A Luftwaffe aircraft found the hulk still drifting the following day and bombed it. Nobody recorded where it went down, which is why S 34 has at least three competing rumoured positions, this one among them. By 18 May the flotilla had been ordered to stop mining and prepare for North Africa, and it left for Derna on 21 May, so no German S-boat was lost off Malta after that.
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Further reading: Malta Dive Sites: Unknown Schnellboot, the index entry and its coordinates · Die Schnellboot-Seite: the loss of S 34 and its rumoured 90 m position · Die Schnellboot-Seite: 3rd S-Flotilla operations in the Mediterranean 1941 to 1942 · Die Schnellboot-Seite: technical data for the S 30 class · Battlefront Malta: Schnellboot operations around Malta and their losses · Wrecksite: S-34, Schnellboot of the S 30 class, lost 17 May 1942