Bowie goes to Malta

Diving Leisure London’s overseas trips drew to a close this year with one final blast to Malta to escape the British weather and enjoy some fantastic diving.
Malta is probably one of the closest destinations to the UK where you can dive in clear blue water on a variety of excellent dive sites.
 
As before on our trip in June, most of us flew into Malta on the Wednesday night after work. This gets you into Malta after midnight and gives you a night in bed (for this read at the pub) before diving the next day.
 
Our hosts for the trip were once again the brilliant guys at Divewise. Diving with Divewise is always a relaxed affair which is lucky when the clocks going back caused a little difficulty for some of our group…
 
Diving in Malta is predominantly done from the shore. The premise is simple, you turn up at the dive centre at a nice sensible hour like 9 O clock. You then grab your gear, jump in one of the vans and then head out to the dive site. You gear up, jump in, have a great dive and then you come out and go and eat lunch before repeating. All whilst the sun shines down.
 
This time around we were  a little unlucky with some windy weather which stopped us getting out to the island of Gozo, however we did get down to the Faroud, a huge purpose sunk  wreck which has been literally ripped in 2 by the sea. It’s an enormous wreck in incredibly clear water and you’ll commonly see large schools of barracuda circling around as well.
Other commonly encountered beasties were octopus and cuttlefish which were present on many of the reef dives we did drifting along the walls and also investigating some of the small caves in the walls
 
Whilst we were there Anthony, Andrew and Francesca all completed their Advanced course, showing some great navigation skills diving on the house reef, and completing their deep dive in the shadow of the Faroud. All three guys also completed their nitrox course as well as Shirley and Lauren who continued her run of coming out of the water warm and comfortable since the purchase of her Fourth Element Proteus suit (available now and very reasonably priced at Diving Leisure London)!
 
Topside we were based in an area called Paceville which is pretty much Malta’s party town, the pubs and bars stay open late and the legendary Huggins pub round the corner from the dive centre gives you an incredibly dangerous 25% off all food and drink when you dive with Divewise. Most days after diving were spent enjoying a few celebratory cisks and enjoying a few light snacks like the mixed grill which put Mark and James into a food coma.
 
On another night Paul and Kirsty invited us over to their pad for drinks, unfortunately due to a highly inaccurate map pitted against my highly advanced navigational skills we walked across a large section of the island before finally homing in on the party. The highlight of the evening was when Anthony discovered that Alistair bore a passing resemblance to David Bowie which resulted in all the fans having their picture taken with their idol.
 
On the Monday Andris and I dived the wreck of the Stbborn a WW2 submarine, the stubborn is an incredible, atmospheric dive with the huge conning tower looming up at you as you swim along the top. The dive also highlighted just how good the UEMIS dive computer is to use and dive with (which is my second and last shameless plug of this blog).
 
Overall we had another excellent trip, we had a great bunch of people and I enjoyed it immensely. Thank you to everyone who came along and also to all the guys at Divewise for running everything so smoothly with a large bunch of people.
We will certainly be returning to Malta next year in the spring so keep an eye out for dates at the start of next year. In the meantime have a look at the pictures from the trip on the fanpage:
 
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