MV Cominoland

You reach Cominoland by finning down the reef slope on a south-easterly bearing until the hull lifts out of the blue, deeper than her top figure suggests, at around 35 metres across the superstructure. The set-piece is the stern, where the mine-laying winch still sits bolted in place, a direct line back to her wartime job. The two decks read cleanly and the cut openings make the interior easy to follow, though silt has gathered inside, so a torch and controlled buoyancy pay off. Fish life packs in tight around the bridge and railings. After the wreck you ascend north back onto the reef, drifting the boulders and Posidonia toward the safety stop and checking crevices for octopus and moray on the way up.

Cominoland is the wreck with a past. She began as a Royal Navy minelayer, and the winch still bolted at her stern gives her a story the other two lack. She is also the stripped-hull half of a deliberate experiment: her paint was removed before sinking while Karwela kept hers, so the pair let you compare two decades of marine growth on near-identical timelines a short fin apart. Compact and upright, she reads as a single unhurried pass through both decks in one dive, which is part of why divers who want history over scale pick her.

She was built in 1942 as a small Royal Navy M-class minelayer, the sixth of her class, designated M6 and named Miner VI (pennant N16). After roughly two decades of naval service she was sold to Maltese owners in 1966 and converted to a passenger ferry, passing through several names over the next decade or so, including Minor Eagle, before settling on Cominoland from 1976. What happened over the two decades after that is not fully settled: by most accounts she was renamed Jylland II around 1980 and reverted to Cominoland in 1982 under new tourist-cruise operators, running day trips around the Grand Harbour and out to Comino until 2006; one record instead has her carrying the Jylland II name for the whole of that stretch. On 12 August 2006 she was scuttled at Xatt l-Ahmar beside Karwela, buoyancy tanks and lift bags settling her upright. There were no casualties. As the paint-off half of the growth experiment, her outer paintwork was stripped completely before she went down.

The wreck starts at 32 metres, already below Malta's 30-metre certification threshold for independent diving, so unless you hold an appropriate deep certification a licensed instructor must accompany you. Nitrox is worth it for bottom time. The two decks are easy to enter through their cut openings, but silt lies inside, so stay off the structure and carry a primary torch. The stern winch and cut edges are sharp in places, and steady trim keeps you clear of them. Cominoland pairs naturally with Karwela a short fin west; most divers plan their gas around the bows at 39 metres and treat the seabed further down, given as anywhere from about 40 to 45 metres, as the dive's technical extension.