Reqqa Point

Limestone shelf, salt pans to one side, open sea on the other. Reach the point on foot, and the headland does the choosing for you: go left and the wall eases down to a 17m reef top, gentle enough for a diver still building experience; go right, and fissures cut the rock down to a 25m sand pocket before the wall drops away hard, past 30m and beyond 60m in clear blue water. A shallow chimney sits between 6 and 17m near the entry, worth a look at the start or end of the dive. From a plateau around 15m, the view opens onto open water with no far side in sight, and the reef floor beyond it drops away faster than it looks like it should. Groupers, dentex and rays hold along the deeper wall. Barracuda hunt here in summer. The return climbs counter-clockwise over house-sized boulders, a stretch that rewards slow eyes: spiny lobsters, moray eels and nudibranchs tucked into the rock, with damselfish and bogue crowding the shallow reef top in dense shoals through the safety stop around 15m.

The Reqqa Bottle is what technical divers come to Reqqa Point to book by name: a chimney with an entrance near 58m and an exit around 35m, built into local diving vocabulary as a destination in its own right, not just a deep corner of the wall. Above it, the same headland covers the rest of Gozo's north coast in one shore entry: a forgiving reef for less experienced divers on the west flank, and a proper wall for the advanced on the east. Technical divers working the chimney occasionally cross paths with an outsized grouper, and rarely, an ocean sunfish drifting through the deep water. More than one local dive shop names it among Gozo's best north-coast dives for exactly this mix of topography and fish life. Reqqa Point shares its headland with Billinghurst Cave a short swim west, and the two are often combined on one outing, though they remain distinct dives rather than the same site under two names. The point carries an older story too: an 18th-century clockmaker is recorded digging salt-pan shafts into a sea cave here, and the following winter, storm waves forced seawater back up through them as a geyser that ruined nearby crops.1

Wind decides whether Reqqa Point is diveable. More than anything else on this stretch of coast, a north-westerly wind and swell can make the shore entry and exit genuinely difficult. In June 2014, a diver died during a difficult shore entry here in swell, and in a separate 2013 incident a diver was forced into a cave by a wave and struck against rock. Check conditions before travelling out rather than assuming access. Sturdy footwear helps for the walk over the limestone shelf, and the site sits roughly 20 minutes by road from Xlendi-area operators, via Victoria and Marsalforn or Żebbuġ. An SMB is worth carrying on the drift-exposed sections of the wall, and a torch pays off both at the shallow entry chimney and on a side trip into Billinghurst Cave on the same outing. Scorpionfish often shelter under the boulders on the return route, nearly invisible against the rock. Hover past them rather than settling on the boulder field.