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Terms of Use

Taħt il-Baħar is free to use and made with care. These are the terms that come with it.

Last updated: 23 September 2026

One section matters more than the rest. If you read nothing else, read section 3: the app plans a dive, it does not make the dive safe.

1. Agreeing to this

By using Taħt il-Baħar — browsing the sites, creating an account, planning a dive, opening a shared plan — you agree to these terms. If you do not, please do not use it.

How we handle what you give us is a separate document: the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

2. What this app is, and what it is not

Taħt il-Baħar is a planning companion for diving in Malta, Gozo and Comino. It lets you:

  • Read up on dive sites: depth, access, what is down there and what to watch for.
  • See a forecast of the sea at a site, and a score for whether it looks divable.
  • Look up the marine life you are likely to meet.
  • Plan a dive, log it afterwards, and share it with a buddy, a centre or a link.
  • Leave a review of a site or record a sighting for other divers.
  • Find dive centres, and register one if you run it.

It is not a dive computer, a decompression planner, a gas calculator you should trust with your life, a navigation instrument, a certifying agency, or a way of telling somebody on shore where you have gone. It does not know your training, your fitness, your kit or the last dive you did. Nothing in it replaces the judgement of a trained diver standing at the water and looking at it.

3. The dive is yours

Diving carries a risk of injury and death

You dive at your own risk and on your own judgement. Every decision — whether to get in, where, with whom, how deep and how long — is yours, and the responsibility for it stays with you. Use this app as one input among several, never as the reason you went in.

Conditions are a forecast, not the sea

Conditions scores come from marine weather models and a handful of coastal stations, not from anyone standing at the entry. Models are wrong often enough to matter, and they know nothing about swell wrapping into a particular bay, a boat in the way, or what the last storm moved. Look at the water before you get in. If what you see disagrees with what the app says, the water is right.

Site information is approximate

Depths, coordinates, bearings, entry points, seabed sketches and distances are approximations gathered from research and from divers. They are good enough to plan with and nowhere near good enough to navigate with. Carry your own tables or computer, plan your own gas, and dive within the limits of your training and certification.

Some sites need a permit, and some are graves

A number of Maltese wrecks are war graves or protected heritage, and diving them requires a Heritage Malta permit and, usually, a licensed centre. Where we know this we say so on the site page, but it is on you to check what the law requires today and to follow it. Treat what is down there accordingly.

Sharing a plan is not telling anyone

A plan shared in this app may not be read by anyone before you are in the water. Tell a real person where you are going and when you expect to be out, and never dive alone.

In an emergency

Call 112. Malta's hyperbaric unit is at Mater Dei Hospital. Do not open this app to work out what to do.

4. Your account

  • You must be at least 16 to hold an account.
  • One account per person, whether you sign in with an email and password or with Google.
  • Keep your password to yourself, and tell us at hello@tahtilbahar.com if you think someone else has got into your account.
  • Say true things about yourself. A certification level in a profile is a claim, not a qualification we verified, and nobody should treat it as one — including whoever is diving with you.

5. What you write and share

It stays yours

Your plans, logs, reviews, sightings and photos remain yours. By posting them you give us permission to store them and to show them to whoever your visibility setting says can see them — nothing more. We do not sell them, license them on, or use them to advertise at you.

Public means public

Reviews and sightings appear on a site page, under your display name, to anyone at all. A share link opens a plan for whoever holds it, without a sign-in. Think before you post, and delete a share link when it has done its job.

What does not belong here

  • Reviews and sightings that are made up, paid for, or written about a site you have not dived.
  • Anything unlawful, abusive, or aimed at a person rather than a place.
  • Somebody else's photos or writing, posted as if it were yours.
  • Anyone else's personal details, including a buddy's, without their say-so.

We may remove anything that breaks this, and we may suspend an account that keeps doing it.

6. Dive centres

Anyone running a dive centre in Malta, Gozo or Comino can register it. Register only a centre you actually run or are authorised to represent, give details that are true, and keep them up to date.

  • Registrations are reviewed before they go public. We can approve, reject or unpublish a listing, and we do not have to explain why.
  • A listing is not an endorsement. We do not check licensing, insurance, instructor qualifications or safety records, and appearing here says nothing about the quality of a centre.
  • What you arrange with a centre is between you and them — the booking, the money, the dive. We are not a party to it.

7. Fair use

Please do not:

  • Scrape the site data, bulk-download it, or republish the dive site and marine life content as your own.
  • Try to reach data that is not yours, work around the sign-in, or probe the app for weaknesses. If you find one by accident, tell us — see the privacy policy.
  • Hammer the service with automated traffic, or do anything that degrades it for other divers.
  • Create accounts to post reviews or sightings that are not honest.

8. Our work and the data behind it

The dive site research, descriptions, access notes, seabed sketches, marine life writing, artwork and the app itself are ours, and are not yours to republish. The data underneath belongs to the people who made it, and their licences travel with it: Copernicus Marine, Open-Meteo, the Oceanography Malta Research Group, aviationweather.gov, and OpenStreetMap for the maps. Every source is credited in full on the about page, which is also where the fonts and icons are credited.

9. Availability and changes

The app is free, and it is offered as it stands. We try to keep it up and accurate, but it may be down for maintenance, a forecast source may stop answering, and features may be added, changed or removed. If we ever shut it down we will give notice, and your data export will keep working until we do — take a copy from account settings whenever you like.

These terms can change too. The date at the top moves when they do, and for anything significant we will tell you in the app or by email. Carrying on using the app after a change means you accept it.

10. Ending it

You can delete your account at any time from account settings. It takes everything with it and cannot be undone, as the privacy policy sets out.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, or that puts other divers or the service at risk. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will say why first.

11. Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

  • The app, the forecasts and the site information are provided as they are, with no warranty that they are accurate, complete, current, or fit for any particular dive.
  • We are not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of the app, including a decision to dive, not to dive, or to dive somewhere, and including lost data.
  • We are not responsible for dive centres, other divers, or anything on another website we link to.

Nothing here excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our own negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be excluded under Maltese or EU law. Your statutory rights as a consumer stand whatever these terms say.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of Malta, and disputes go to the Maltese courts — without taking away the protection of the consumer law of the EU country you live in, or your right to bring a case there.

Consumers in the EU can also use the European Commission's online dispute resolution platform.

13. Contact

Dive safe, and mind the swell at the entry.