Camp Bay

A day at Camp Bay is usually two shore dives, one to each side of the bay. You kit up on the beach, swim a short way over sand and drop onto hulls already thick with growth. In one spot two wrecks lie side by side with a corridor of sand between them, a false canyon to float through.

The 482 is the centrepiece. She sits upright on the sand, bow to the north, and a circuit of her follows the ship's own plan: forward through the open hold, where storage racks and a caged paint locker still hold their tins, past the two small cabins, then back along the other side to the winches, the accommodation block with its shower and toilets, and the cable drum aft. Octopus, spider crabs, cuttlefish and pipefish work her decks, and hole-dwellers crowd under her bow and stern. A short distance south-east, Batty's Barge has lost part of its hull and deck, and the collapse has left a large open interior.

On the shallower barges the interest turns small. Nudibranchs are the draw there, with flabellinas and other aeolids, several Hypselodoris species and Felimare on the hulls.

The 482 is a listed piece of Gibraltar's submerged heritage, and you reach her by swimming out from a town beach. A former Royal Navy cable-layer, she still carries the fittings of a working ship, from the paint locker in her hold to the cable drum on her stern. Within a short swim of her lie about ten more hulls, from barges sunk in the 1950s to a wooden boat sent down in 2006, so a single entry covers three decades of reef-building.

The first two "Spanish" barges are believed to have been sunk in the 1950s after works on the Camp Bay jetty. Two more followed in the 1980s as part of the artificial reef project. In August 1990 the Royal Navy cable-layer 482 was scuttled off Camp Bay under Gibraltar's artificial reef programme1, and Batty's Barge went down the same summer. The Ark of Jesus Christ, a 27m wooden Spanish fishing boat, joined them in 1994, and the True Joy, a 26m, 65-ton wooden boat also called Noah's Ark, in April 2006.

The bay sits inside the Southern Waters of Gibraltar protected area, where collecting marine life is banned, and every diver needs a permit, which a licensed operator covers. On a calm day any current is gentle: swim into it on the way out and let it carry you back. Going inside the 482 or Batty's Barge takes wreck training and a torch. The older hulls are coming apart, with the Ark's bow already collapsed and the True Joy badly broken up, so hold your buoyancy clear of both.