Dunraven

The Dunraven lies upside down and broken in two on the sand, directly below the South Cardinal Beacon at the southern tip of Sha'ab Mahmoud, the reef also known as Beacon Rock. The wreck is about 80 m long and 10 m wide. The bow is the shallow end, at about 15 m, with plenty of openings to look into and no way inside. The stern lies at about 29 m and is where divers enter: a swim-through beside the boilers that leaves through the break where the hull parted. The interior is described as cathedral-like, with beams of light through the portholes, old hessian ropes and the remains of wooden cargo boxes on the way. The exit is usually filled with glassfish in their thousands, and a ball of them sits by the boilers.

Operators run the dive in both directions. Some enter at the stern, swim through, fin over the coral-covered hull and finish on the reef wall and the shallows. Others start at the bow, cross the interior including the engine room and leave towards the coral garden on the east side. The current is reported to run north to south, and boats anchor north of the wreck. Circle Divers runs it as a drift dive. The safety stop on the reef is where schools of yellow goatfish, young barracuda and stonefish gather.

One wreck gives two dives. At about 15 m the bow can be read at leisure from outside, coral cover and openings included. At about 29 m the stern is where the wreck turns into an overhead dive. The same coral wraps both halves, so a single site covers a shallow exterior look and a deeper interior pass, and the reef wall at the end of the dive gives the safety stop something to look at. The story of how the wreck came to be found, a marketing invention included, is the other reason people ask for it by name.

The Dunraven was a British iron cargo ship under steam and sail, built by Charles Mitchell and Co. at Newcastle upon Tyne.1 Her launch is recorded as 14 December 1872 and also given as 1873. She was wrecked on Sha'ab Mahmoud in April 1876, on the 22nd by one account and the 25th by another, on a voyage between Britain and Bombay. Her captain, Edward Richards Care, was 26, and no one is reported to have died.

The wreck then lay unvisited by divers for a century. In the late 1970s Howard Rosenstein, who ran Red Sea Divers, and the graphic artist Shlomo Cohen invented a Lawrence of Arabia gold wreck to draw divers to the Sinai coast. A Bedouin fisherman's directions, measured in cigarettes, led to the real wreck in 1977.2 Naming her took about a year: porcelain plates bearing the ship's name turned up in the galley, and the name was cleared from the stern with a pneumatic grinder. Soda torpedo bottles and plates dated her to the 1870s, and animal bones in a forward section show livestock aboard.

A BBC film in 1979 made the wreck famous at once. When Sinai was divided on 25 January 1980 the Dunraven fell on the Egyptian side and was out of limits for Israeli operators until after the 1982 withdrawal. The artefacts easiest to carry off are thought to have gone between 1977 and 1980.

On 16 December 2009 the liveaboard Emperor Fraser broke her mooring lines in a wind shift at the Dunraven and struck the reef. Everyone was rescued.

The stern swim-through is overhead diving, and the interior holds silt that lifts quickly, so hover in trim and keep off the surfaces. The reef gives some shelter, but the site is exposed and the surface can still be rough, and weather can stop the boat. Current is occasional, so ask at the briefing how the drift is planned. At the end, over the reef, hold your depth in mid-water with buoyancy control, because stonefish sit on it.