Gibraltar

Anne Llambias, 41

Anne Llambias, 41, lives in Sale, near Manchester, and works as a GP. She has been a diver for 12 years, and is a BSAC first-class advanced instructor. Her husband, John, is a national instructor, and one of her four daughters, Juliet, now 16, learned to dive in Gibraltar three years ago. Potential divers Alice, six, Helen, four, and nine-month-old Anna are waiting until they’re old enough.

I’ve dived Gibraltar loads of times – maybe 20 times. My husband John, who I met when we joined the same BSAC branch, comes from Gibraltar, so we often go there. We dive the same old favourites, but they always look different, and we find new sites too.

During the past ten years we’ve dived both the Atlantic and Mediterranean sides, and things have changed over that period. At one point there was a lot of building work and land reclamation, and the visibility did deteriorate, but now that’s all stopped and the visibility is great. In fact, we recently dived there and the visibility was around 50m. Because Gibraltar is situated between two oceans, the tides are difficult to predict. One day you’ll be out there and the tide will be running like a train, and the next day it will be completely calm. Gibraltar has diving for everyone: there are wrecks in 10 to 15m depth for beginners, and we always find adventurous diving. On most trips we see dolphins and enormous grouper, and one site, Los Picos, has huge octopuses – perhaps as big as me. One year we were able to watch flamingos migrating to Africa while we were on the boat.

We nearly always dive with Fred Short at Rock Marine, and most of the diving is boat diving. The sites are generally between ten and 30 minutes away by boat. My favourite wreck is the Excellent, which lies upside down. It has recently broken up, and is changing all the time, but you can swim all the way through what’s left of the wreck, looking out at the soft coral and fish.

We have tried diving Morocco from Gibraltar, as it is only 30 minutes away by RIB, but it’s difficult to get diving permits, and the second time we visited Morocco we weren’t allowed to dive. So, we just had a Moroccan meal and visited a souk! However, the diving round Gibraltar is great and varied, as is the fish life. The night diving, when you are likely to see octopuses and cuttlefish, is particularly enjoyable. We’ve dived there at all times of the year, wearing shorties in summer and drysuits in winter.

Through the Joint Services – the Army and Navy – diving club we were able to dive the cave system inside the Rock, which was amazing. The caves are owned by the military, and you need to get permission to dive them. They are filled with water – salt at the bottom and fresh at the top – with huge stalactites and stalagmites.

Tom Hood, 32

Tom Hood, 32, lives in Nottingham and is an engineer. He is a BSAC advanced diver and club instructor, and has been diving for 18 years. He dived in Gibraltar with Simply Diving, which is based in Torremolinos on the Costa del Sol.

I’m a member of Nottingham University diving club and know Nevin and Anna [who run Simply Diving] from when they were also members. A few past and current members of the club went diving in southern Spain in November 2000 for a week, and Simply Diving arranged our accommodation for us. The holiday included a day trip to do two dives in Gibraltar, and they were the best dives of the week.

The drive from Torremolinos was about an hour by minibus and we then went to on Dive Hire in Gibraltar. Both the dives that day were wrecks, and we got to both sites by hardboat. The water was quite chilly at that time of year, although it was sunny and we were wearing hired wetsuits. The visibility was good – about 15m – and the dive briefings were excellent.

The first wreck, the Rosslyn, was just outside the breakwater wall in about 20m, and close to the British nuclear submarine that there’s been all that fuss about. It was about 90m long, impressive in size and listing to starboard with the structure largely intact. It was a scenic dive, absolutely teeming with fish. It was the kind of wreck you’d see on the west coast of Scotland, and I almost felt as though I was in Scotland, except that this wreck had huge numbers of fish.

The second site, another wreck, was five or six minutes past the first one. The bottom was at about 15m, where there was a wreck of a tugboat that had been pulling a barge. They sank together and are still connected by a cable. There is no silt, and you can swim through the engine room. There were quite a few fish, but not as many as on the first wreck. We played with two octopuses and in the hold saw two squid that were dancing together. They were copying each other, one adopting the same attitude as the other. After the second dive it was back to the marina, so we could have a look at the millionaires’ yachts. The other dives off Spain were nice but not as interesting as those in Gibraltar.

Michael Brewitt, 38

Michael Brewitt, 38, is a leading chef in the Navy, and learned to dive with the BSAC in 1997. His home in the UK is just north of Edinburgh, but he is currently living in Brussels with his wife Carol, daughter Roslyn, seven, and twin sons Andrew and Kieran, five. Between 1996 and 1999 he lived in Gibraltar, where he learned to dive.

Before I learned to dive in Gibraltar I must have done five or six try dives on various holidays or in places I was posted to with the Navy, including Corfu and Kenya. But I decided to learn properly in Gibraltar and am now a BSAC sports diver. In Gibraltar I dived around four times a week and I really miss it. I’m going back there for a ten-day holiday in August this year, and I’m planning to do lots of diving. I certainly got used to the good visibility: between Gibraltar and Brussels I lived in the UK again and dived in the River Forth, where you can’t see your hand in front of your face!

One of my favourite dives was Fred Flintstones on the Mediterranean side of Gibraltar. The beach slopes very gradually on that side, so it has to be a boat dive to get the depth, and as it’s quite exposed it’s not one of the most-dived sites. The site is at 32m and is really just some big boulders but it has amazing sea life, including different types of fish from those you get on the Atlantic side of Gibraltar. It’s especially good for big groupers and moray eels. The first time I dived the site we put the line down on top of a Roman anchor by chance. It was big and made of solid lead – not something you could bring back to the surface!

You can often find parts of Gibraltar’s history underwater: there are cannon piles from the 18th century, loads of bits of clay pipes about, and you can sometimes spot old clay gin bottles. I never saw a shark while diving in Gibraltar, although I have seen dead sharks and turtles washed up on the beaches. There are a lot of dolphins in the area, which are attracted to the boats, but I never dived with any. Some of the larger fish I saw were electric rays, congers, a stargazer, and a massive monkfish, which was bigger than me – about 2m long, with a huge head.

On Gibraltar’s Atlantic side there is a deep natural harbour, so you don’t have to go a long way out to dive. I particularly enjoyed diving the Rosslyn, a wreck in 19m only about 10–15m off the harbour wall. It sank in the late 19th century but is pretty intact, and with the good visibility that you tend to get there it’s a good dive. The Camp Bay Barges were another good site: they were sunk deliberately in 10–11m, and have a swim-through cut into them. You see loads of big crabs, moray eels and octopuses.

Gibraltar diving has everything, really. As well as good wrecks, it has nice reefs with soft corals and sponges and a great variety of Atlantic and Mediterranean fish. You only really need a thin wetsuit in summer, and although I would now use a drysuit in winter, I used to simply dive in a thicker wetsuit. The visibility is often around 15–20m and at its very worst gets down to 5m. And you can dive all year round. Even in windy weather there are sites that can be dived, and many places have little current.

Ned Middleton, 50

Ned Middleton, 50, has been diving for 25 years and is a BSAC advanced instructor and first-class diver. He lives in Norfolk and is an underwater photojournalist.

I’ve dived Gibraltar on many occasions and first went there in 1977. Nowhere in Gibraltar is far from the sea and you will find wrecks close to shore almost wherever you choose to dive.

Gibraltar doesn’t have the crystal-clear waters of, say, Cyprus, so it has been overlooked in terms of diving but it’s a gold mine for dives and has so much to offer. It has excellent shipwrecks, for example the 428 is a super little wreck, and the Rosslyn, which sank in a gale, is fabulous. The SS Excellent is also superb. It sank in 1888: it was dragging its anchors, ran into two other vessels, turned over and sank just outside the harbour. It still lies upside down, and you can enter a crack on the port side and turn right, swim through and exit. Inside, it’s as though you’re on a night dive: it’s very dark and your torch illuminates lime-green and dark purple gorgonians. Underneath you, the bottom is carpeted with brittlestars, almost as though there were a plague of them, and inside the ship are all the bits and pieces relating to shipping of that era. That’s what I mean when I say advanced diving on your doorstep – swimming through an upside-down wreck in darkness is an advanced dive. As well as historic shipwrecks, over the years vessels have been sunk deliberately to create dive sites. This all started in the late 1970s when the man who oversaw the diving programme for successive regiments of the Royal Greenjackets negotiated the sinking of the Okeanus – a tugboat that had reached the end of its useful life. Several other boats have subsequently been sunk.

Gibraltar is not a place for a liveaboard. The best way to dive it is two dives a day, coming back to shore for lunch in between, and then enjoying all that Gibraltar has to offer during the evenings. In terms of diving it’s underrated yet when you consider that a Gibraltar winter, in terms of visibility and water temperature, is on a par with a good summer in Britain, it’s well worth diving.







Local dive operators

Dive Charters Gibraltar, tel: 00 350 45649;
e-mail:  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ; web site: http://www.divegib.gi/.
Dive Hire, tel: 00 350 73616;
e-mail:  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ;
web site: http://www.gibbell.gi/buss/divehire/index.htm.
Rock Marine, tel: 00 350 73147; e-mail:  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Simply Diving (Torremolinos) tel: 00 34 600 506 526
e-mail:  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Flights and accommodation
GB Airways, tel: 01293 664239;
web site: http://www.gbairways.com.
Monarch Airlines, tel: 01582 400000; web site: http://www.monarch-airlines.com.
Otherwise, Malaga in southern Spain has the nearest airport: about two hours’ drive away.
Flights are available from Buzz Airlines, tel: 0870 2407070;
web site: http://www.buzzaway.com and Iberia
International Airlines, tel: 0845 6012854;
web site: www.iberia.com.
For accommodation contact the Gibraltar Tourist Board, tel:
020 7836 0777; e-mail  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ; web site:http://www.gibraltar.gi.