The Um El Faroud is a brilliant wreck that is sunk at the
Blue Grotto in the south of Malta. From Divewise, it’s about a 30 minute drive,
40 minutes at most if you go at rush hour! (or rather rush day, the roads seem
hellish 24/7!).
Location
Wreck description
She was built in 1969 at Smith Dock Co. Ltd, Middlesbrough,
England and was owned by the General National Maritime Transport Company,
Tripoli (GNMTC). She had been operating between Italy and Libya carrying
refined fuel up to 1 February 1995. On 3 February 1995 she was docked at No.3
Dock of Malta dry docks. During the night of 3 February an explosion occurred
in No.3 centre tank and nine shipyard workers lost their lives.
The vessel suffered structural deformation and, following
inspection and survey, was considered a total write-off. She occupied the dock
in the harbor of Valletta for three years until it was decided that the best
option to utilize her remaining value was to tow her to sea and scuttle her as
an artificial reef in 1998.
An excellent visualisation of the wreck is available as a 3D
model by Fourth Element : http://www.fourthelement.com/adventures/3d_um_el_faroud_wreck_map.php
Dive Team
Vas (Guide & A), Irwin Sheer(A), Lolke ‘Mr Faroud’ (B),
Svenke Wall (B) and Chris Armstrong (B).
Dive log
The Faroud is located about 100m off shore, but its
recommended not to do a surface swim, I don’t think there are even any surface
buoys so you miss the wreck completely! Instead you jump in at the bottom of
the hill. Boats are running in and out of here all the time, so I recommend
that once you leave this local area you stay well under water.
We dropped down to about 10m and swarm out the mouth of the
river. We followed the reef on the far wall around for a while before taking a
bearing off into the blue. The sea floor is at about 32m which you can see
clearly below you, it makes you feel quite small with the viz being 30-50m! It’s
also quite nice swimming through the blue, looking around I can see my team all
around me, above, below, behind and infront, with our guide, Vas, out in front.
It takes about 5 minutes of swimming through the blue and
you start to see a shape forming and before you know it you can clearly see the
huge wreck that is the Faroud. To protect our gas and no-deco time, we stayed
shallow at about 12-15m the minute we were above the wreck, I dropped out of
trim into a head first finning descent, swimming straight past the stern of the
ship, Svenke, Lolke and I dropped down to about 33m to the screws (propeller).
A nearby piece of pipe held a medium sized moray eel. I tried to light it up
for Svenke to video, but the closer Svenke got the more the eel retreated in
the pipe!
Swimming over the prop and then coming up on the port side
of the ship moving slowly forward. The first large hatch that we came to had a
massive underwater queue of people trying to move through it! So Lolke led us
forward and the next hatch we came to we went in. We had agreed with Vas a
maximum of 15 mins inside the wreck and given how busy it was we didn’t spend
anywhere near that long.
Lolke led, Svenke followed with his video lamp on, I took
position 3 and tried to light up as best as I could for Svenke. The first
compartment looked like a an observation deck as it stretched a good length of
the ship. Directly opposite the external hatch was a door to a corridor, to the
right I could see the engine room (or storage) and below me. But we stayed on
this level and turned left Following the
corridor further we came out underneath the bridge where we met Vas and the
American.
My favourite kind of scuba diving is cave diving, so being
inside a wreck was my idea of heaven, and with it being perfectly intact I was
extremely happy. I met Vas just outside and she gave me a fairly relaxed “Are
you OK?” gesture. I shook my head to say no, I obviously wasn’t OK – I was ecstatic!
So I took my reg out with my right hand and did a massive Cheshire Cat grin
that was so big I had to close my eyes to emphasise it even more! I also tensed
my arms and made them shake to show the excitement! Holding that for a second,
I then opened my eyes to see Vas attempt to laugh – which had the effect of
almost spitting out her reg, obviously her body then went “Oi don’t let that
reg go!” and it looked like she coughed as she clamped down on it again! It’s
hard to explain with words, but I felt like I 12 year old in Disney world, THIS
is wreck diving!
After composing ourselves, we swam forward to where the
stern of the ship is broken from the bow / storage section. I led swimming
forward, the open storage area that I came to was the size of several double
decker busses. Having a ferret about in these compartments on a future dive is
a must!
Between us, we reckon that a Maltese man was lowered in to
one of the fuel tanks to clean it out, being a typical Maltese, he was smoking
a cigar, then boom! And now we have a lovely wreck!
I swam into the open compartment of the forward section of
the wreck and had a good nosey about! I was trying to be a video light diver
for Svenke so I was getting right in the holes and lighting it up.
I turned and headed back to the bridge. We teamed up with
Vas and Irwin and swam down the starboard deck. Returning to the stern we then
started heading back to the shore. I liked to swim along the reef and over the
wall to look at all the fish. The colours are beautiful. There were fish in all
the little holes which was good fun to look in to.
The fish life on the wreck and the reef is stunning.
Video
Svenke has graciously edited his video and put it on YouTube
for all to see.
No comments:
Post a Comment