Diving · Sep 23, 2026

SS Thistlegorm: the most famous wreck dive in the world

Sunk full in 1941, and still full

The SS Thistlegorm is the most famous wreck dive in the world, and unusually for something with that reputation, the reputation is deserved. It is not famous because it is deep or dangerous or hard to reach. It is famous because it is a British supply ship that was still full when it went down in 1941, and eighty-odd years later you can swim through the holds and look at what was in them.

The night of 6 October 1941

She was built by J. L. Thompson and Sons in Sunderland and finished in June 1940 — 4,898 gross tons, an armed merchant ship in a war that was going badly. In September 1941 she sailed for Alexandria the long way round, up the east coast of Africa and into the Red Sea, because the Mediterranean was closed to her.

She never arrived. Held up waiting for the Suez Canal to clear, she anchored at Sha'ab Ali in the Strait of Gubal. Two Heinkel He 111 bombers of II./KG 26, flying out of Crete, were hunting a troop ship and found the anchorage instead. At 0130 on 6 October 1941 two bombs hit hold 4, near the stern, where the ammunition was stored.

The explosion tore the stern apart and threw one of the deck locomotives clear of the ship. Four sailors and five DEMS gunners were killed. She was on the bottom inside ten minutes.

Diving the Red Sea

Diving the Red Sea

What is down there

This is the part that makes the dive what it is. The manifest was the resupply of the Eighth Army, and most of it is still in the holds where it was stowed:

Bedford trucks, in rows, some of them with motorcycles loaded in the back — which is exactly how they were shipped, to save space.
BSA and Norton 16H motorcycles, the image everybody has seen, still stacked and still recognisable down to the handlebars.
Universal Carriers — the tracked armoured vehicles usually called Bren gun carriers.
Bren guns, .303 rifles, ammunition, radio equipment, aircraft parts.
Wellington boots. Thousands of them. It is a strange thing to find at thirty metres and it is the detail most divers remember.

Nothing about it is arranged. It is a cargo ship that sank while loaded, and it reads like one.

Inside a Red Sea wreck

Inside a Red Sea wreck

The locomotives

She was also carrying two LMS Stanier Class 8F steam locomotives with their tenders and water carriers, bound for Egyptian National Railways, lashed on deck because they would not go anywhere else.

When hold 4 went up, the blast threw them off the ship. They are now sitting on the seabed on either side of the wreck, upright, some distance out — a pair of British steam locomotives on sand in the Red Sea. They are the strangest thing in Egyptian diving and they are the reason a lot of people book the trip.

The diving

The wreck lies upright, broken at the stern, in roughly 16 to 30 metres of water — the deck around 16 to 18, the seabed and the deepest points nearer 30. That is comfortable recreational depth, which is a large part of why it is dived so much.

Current is the real variable. The Strait of Gubal funnels water and the Thistlegorm can be still one day and genuinely demanding the next. Boats run a line to the wreck and you pull yourself down it. A diver who is unhappy in current will be unhappy here, and that has very little to do with how many dives are in the logbook.

Two dives is the standard. The first is usually the outside — the stern damage, the guns, the locomotives, the shape of the ship. The second goes into the holds, which is where the trucks and the motorcycles are. Both are needed; one dive gives you half a wreck.

Inside is easy penetration by wreck-diving standards — the holds are open, large and well lit from above — but it is still overhead environment. Silt is everywhere and one careless fin stroke takes the visibility away from everybody behind you.

A diver on the reef

A diver on the reef

It is also a reef now

Eighty-odd years on the bottom has turned a cargo ship into a structure, and the Red Sea has treated it the way it treats any structure. The railings, the davits, the gun platforms and every exposed edge are furred over with soft and hard coral, and the fish have moved in properly rather than passing through.

What you tend to see:

Glassfish in the holds, in clouds dense enough to hide a truck, parting around you and closing behind you.
Batfish, which will follow you the entire dive with an air of mild proprietorship.
Giant moray, lionfish, scorpionfish and crocodilefish, all of which are much easier to put a hand on by accident than people expect — another reason for good buoyancy.
Jacks and barracuda hanging in the current off the bow, doing what predators do near a structure that concentrates small fish.

Divers who come for the history are usually surprised by how much of the dive is simply a good reef dive. Divers who come for the marine life find the cargo unexpectedly hard to stop looking at. It is rare for a site to satisfy both.

You can look at it before you go

The Thistlegorm has been the subject of an ongoing underwater archaeological survey — photogrammetry, 360-degree video and digital elevation models, assembled into a record of the wreck as it is now. The point of it is preservation: a ship that is quietly falling apart is at least documented while it is still legible.

For a diver it has a practical use as well. Twenty minutes with the survey material beforehand and you arrive knowing the layout — where hold 2 is relative to the bridge, which way the bow points, where the stern damage starts. That is the difference between recognising what you are swimming over and being told afterwards what you swam over.

Getting there from Hurghada, honestly

The Thistlegorm sits closer to Sharm el-Sheikh than to Hurghada, and most of the world dives it from there or from a liveaboard. From Hurghada it is a long boat run, and a day trip means an early start, several hours out, two dives, and several hours back.

That is the honest trade. You are buying a great deal of boat for two dives. People who have done it almost universally say it was worth it, and people who get seasick almost universally say they wish they had known what the crossing was like.

If you are staying in Hurghada and you want this dive, a day trip is how you do it, and the day is long. If you are diving for a week, a liveaboard that includes the Thistlegorm gives you the wreck at dawn before the day boats arrive, which is a materially better dive.

What level of diver you need to be

Open Water with a reasonable number of dives is the practical floor, and Advanced is what most operators want, mainly for the depth and the current rather than for anything technical about the wreck.

What actually matters:

Comfort in current, including pulling yourself down and up a line.
Buoyancy you do not have to think about. Inside the holds, near eighty-year-old cargo, with a queue of divers behind you, is the wrong place to be sorting out your trim.
Air consumption good enough that the second dive is not cut short at the interesting part.
A torch. The holds are lit from above but everything worth looking at is in shadow.

If you were certified last week, this is not the dive to make your fifth. Do a few days on the Hurghada reefs first and come back to it.

Red Sea diving from a day boat

Red Sea diving from a day boat

A war grave, not an attraction

Nine men died on board and the wreck is their grave. Nothing comes off it. This is not a rule invented for tourists — the Thistlegorm has been picked over for decades and it shows, and a lot of what divers came to see in the 1990s is simply gone now.

The ship is also deteriorating. The holds are opening up and mooring lines tied to the structure have done real damage over the years. What you go to see is finite, which is an argument for going and a stronger argument for touching nothing.