Wreck · to 46m / 151ft
MT Hephaestus
One of the dive sites we run here in Malta — here's the story behind it, the depth and access, and what it takes to dive it properly.
One of the dive sites we run here in Malta — here's the story behind it, the depth and access, and what it takes to dive it properly.
MT Hephaestus was a steel bunkering tanker — 61m long with an 8m beam, built in 1965 at the Kållandsö yard in Lidköping, Sweden — that spent her working life refuelling ships in Maltese waters. Malta knows her for one dramatic morning: on 10 February 2018, in one of the fiercest storms to hit the islands in decades, she dragged her anchor from the Is-Sikka l-Bajda anchorage and was driven onto the rocks at Qawra Point. Her crew of seven were brought off unharmed, and for months the stranded tanker sat hard against the Qawra shoreline — one of the most photographed sights in Malta that year. After a difficult salvage she was refloated, laid up and stripped, and on 29 August 2022 the Malta Tourism Authority, the PDSA and the Ministry for Gozo gave her a better ending than the scrapyard: scuttled off Xatt l-Aħmar as Gozo's newest wreck. She sits upright on a sandy seabed at about 46m, roughly 30m offshore — within swimming distance of the MV Karwela, Cominoland and Xlendi, completing one of the best wreck clusters in the Mediterranean.
The Hephaestus is the intact one of the Xatt l-Aħmar family. Scuttled recently and prepared properly, she's clean, upright and open — the tanker deck, wheelhouse and bow make a natural circuit, and the openings cut before sinking allow straightforward penetration for trained wreck divers. At 46m to the sand she sits right at the boundary between recreational-technical and proper decompression diving, which makes her an outstanding objective for a Decompression Procedures dive — enough depth to be honest, enough wreck to be worth every minute of the obligation.
She can be dived from shore — the entry is the same as for the Karwela — or, the comfortable way, from the boat. Because she's the newest of the cluster, her colonisation is still young: each season more growth, more fish, more character. Diving her now means watching a wreck become a reef in real time. Combine her with the Karwela on a single decompression plan and you've got one of the best technical double-bills in Gozo.
The diving here suits divers at Decompression Procedures level. If you’re not there yet, these are the courses that get you there:
Already certified and just want to dive it? Come and explore it with me on open circuit or CCR — one relaxed dive a day, no rushing, as long in the water as you like.
Want to dive the Hephaestus? Tell me your certification level and your dates, and I'll plan it with you. No pressure, no hard sell — just a good dive.