P31 (Patrol Boat)

The shallow, bright Comino water shows the wreck quickly once you follow the guide line down from the mooring. The dive is a relaxed lap: run the exterior first, the low upright hull with its slight lean to port, the open deck spaces, the fast-growing reef on the plating, then, for the trained, swim the interior stern to bow through the opened compartments, mindful that the engine room has silted with sand. Because she tops out at 12 metres and bottoms near 20, no-decompression time is generous and she suits long, easy dives. The one non-negotiable is the ascent. The Comino channel carries boat traffic, so send an SMB up from depth before you surface.

P31 is the easy, accessible wreck of the Malta and Gozo circuit. When the region's other wrecks sit at 30 metres and beyond, she is the one an Open Water diver or a first-time wreck diver can actually experience. She lies upright in clear Comino water, and the whole 52-metre hull reads from a single mid-water pass over the bridge and deck. Colonisation has been fast and dense, so the plating is already a lively little reef. Her military lines and Cold War past give her more story than her modest size suggests, and against her deeper sister P29 off Cirkewwa, P31 is the accessible one.

P31 began as the Pasewalk, an East German Kondor I-class minesweeper built at the Peenewerft yard in Wolgast and commissioned in 1969, the eighth ship of her class. She patrolled the border rivers between East and West Germany for the Volksmarine until the navy was disbanded around reunification, and she was decommissioned in 1990. Malta bought her on 1 July 1992 together with her sister Ueckermunde, the two taking the pennants P31 and P30; a third sister, Boltenhagen, followed only in 1997 to become P29. As a Maltese patrol boat she worked anti-smuggling and border patrols, once rescuing 251 people from a sinking boat far south of Malta in heavy weather. Retired in 2004 and bought by the Malta Tourism Authority, she was cleaned, stripped and scuttled off the west coast of Comino on 25 August 2009, the sinking position shifted about 30 metres onto bare sand to protect the Posidonia seagrass beds1. Winter storms in 2010 and 2011 later moved the wreck a short way from the mooring buoy.

P31 is boat access only, reached on a Comino boat day alongside the island's caverns and reefs. At 12 to 20 metres she is well within Open Water limits, one of the few wrecks in the region that newer and trainee divers can dive on a guided group dive; Malta's national rule requires a licensed instructor for anyone without a 30-metre certification to dive independently, whatever the depth.2 The interior is an easy stern-to-bow swim-through, but it is still an overhead: the engine room has silted with sand, so treat penetration as a trained skill with a torch and good buoyancy, not a default. The wreck shifted about 25 metres from the buoy in the 2010-2011 storms, so follow the guide line rather than the old mark. Above all, deploy an SMB at depth before ascending, because the Comino channel is busy with boats.