The Bowbell

Boats grapnel-hook into a hull that sits broken in sections but largely upright, between about 21 and 32 metres off Madeira's south-west coast. One first-hand account, guided by Focusnatura's Hugo Silva, went in through a hatchway behind the bridge, along a gantry, down a stairway into the engine room, past gauges, light-fittings, fire extinguishers and life-vests still hanging where they were left, probably the ones that were aboard in 1989.1 Most of the marine life concentrates around the bow, with little near the propeller; a moray eel and a grouper work the deck-winches and machinery around a deck-mounted crane. Visibility is the wildcard: a good day here runs close to 8 metres, and silt disturbed inside the hull can go to zero within a few breaths, so guides keep the pace slow and the fin kicks off the bottom.

Sources consistently set this wreck against Madeira's deliberately scuttled corvette: rawer and less curated, with penetration allowed in places but rated less safe, and reserved for an operator's own guide. What sets it apart is not the diving itself but the vessel's own history. The Bowbelle is the Thames dredger that rammed and sank the pleasure launch Marchioness on the river in 1989, killing 51 people in one of London's worst peacetime river disasters; a 2011 dive-magazine feature on this wreck spends almost its entire length on that story before the writer even gets in the water. A long-time Madeira-based diver independently describes it, unprompted, as "a very popular wreck dive with an infamous history."1 It is also simply harder to get to and harder to book than the scuttled corvette, a rawer trip for divers who want the exploratory version.

She was built as a 1,475-ton suction hopper dredger and named Bowbelle. On 20 August 1989, working the Thames at night, she collided with the 47-ton pleasure launch Marchioness, rolling and sinking her in under 30 seconds; a 1995 inquest returned unlawful killing, and a 2000 public inquiry found the Bowbelle "well known on the Thames as a rogue ship" with a history of prior collisions, though her skipper kept his licence and faced no further action.1 The vessel was later sold to a Madeira sand-dredging company and renamed Bom Rei, "Good King." On 25 March 1996, working off the island's south-west coast, she broke in half and sank; divers found her six months later. Accounts of the sinking itself disagree, though every source agrees on the date.

This is not a casual add-on dive. Access is boat-only, 45 to 70 minutes depending on the operator, and even centres that run it have historically gone only once or twice a month, a pattern reported a decade apart by two independent accounts; it is not a dive you book on demand, so plan ahead. Currently, XPoint Madeira (formerly known as Madeira Divepoint, based in Funchal) lists the wreck among its dive spots; Focusnatura, a technical-diving centre in Santa Cruz, ran trips here as of a 2011 feature; whether it still does is unconfirmed. AOW is the stated minimum to dive it at all; going inside needs a wreck specialty certification and an operator's own guide, and at least one long-time local guide doesn't normally take divers into the interior. Expect visibility on the poor side of average as the norm here, not an occasional low; treat any bold marketing claim about it with scepticism, and dive the interior only with your guide's line, since no fixed marker buoy sits on the wreck.