Scuba Diving Magazine, Sept/Oct. 2009

It’s a little after daybreak. The quiet on board breaks without warning, replaced with loud commands delivered in terse Arabic as the agile crew swings into position to man the lines. We have arrived.

My dive boat has been motoring along the coast of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula for nearly four predaylight hours. I walk out of the main cabin, where I’ve slept most of the bumpy ride huddled on the thin cushions of the bench lining the wall, and see the divemaster disappear over the side, bounce-diving to tie a guide­line from our stern to the wreck. I pour a cup of thick Arabic coffee and groggily prep my gear in the early morning light. In a few minutes, I’ll hop off the stern myself and make my way to the seafloor to penetrate the deepest bowels of what is arguably the most famous and histori­cally rich shipwreck in the Red Sea.

A dive trip to the British supply ship SS Thistlegorm requires no small amount of effort, but it’s unquestionably worth it for an opportunity to slip inside this veritable World War II time capsule, bur­ied by a hailstorm of German bombs in 1941 while en route to deliver her cargo of supplies to Allied troops in Suez. After sinking, the Thistlegorm lay undisturbed for about 14 years, explains John Kean, an experienced Thistlegorm guide and author of the book “SS Thistlegorm: The True Story of the Red Sea’s Greatest Ship­wreck.” At which time a budding explorer named Jacques Cousteau — piloting another soon-to-be-legendary ship, the Calypso — moored up to her and made the first-ever scuba-fueled explorations of her decks. Today, the Thistlegorm draws tens of thousands each year.

I make one final check of the condi­tions. Out here at the mouth of the Gulf of Suez, current and surface chop are common, and today has both. So I giant-stride off the stern with an empty BC and make a beeline down the guide rope to the shelter of the Thistlegorm’s hull. Descending over the blast zone — where German bombs detonated munitions holds near the stern — I can see both sections of the 415-foot-long ship: The front half sits mostly intact, upright at the shallower end of the slop­ing seafloor, while the stern, twisted 90 degrees, rests on its port side in about 95 feet of water. As I approach the opening in the hull, I glide over the tracks of a pair of Mark II Bren Carrier tanks, upside­down in the pile of munitions.

Unlike a passenger ship, with an inte­rior full of winding passageways and cabins, the Thistlegorm features wide-open cargo holds and no shortage of vertical exit points. Slipping inside the wreck at Hold 3 feels a bit like walking into a war museum where shafts of sun­light illuminate the displays through skylights in the roof. I find myself sur­rounded by piles of  hand grenades and anti-tank mines scattered in a state of dis­array pretty much as they fell after the ship touched down on the seafloor. It’s an impressive collection, but I know the most striking is ahead of me in the for­ward compartments.

The Thistlegorm’s first and second holds overflow with a payload of large war material. My gaze extends across row after row of Bedford trucks, intact down to the tires and packed in the belly of the ship like sardines. And each truck bed is loaded to capacity with BSA motorcycles. Stacked along walls sit crates of medical supplies, Enfield rifles and endless boxes of ammuni­tion. The gravity of this cargo hits me like a wave. It’s a drop in the bucket of what was required to keep that massive Allied war machine moving, but peo­ple’s lives depended on this stuff — they never got it, and good people died try­ing to deliver it.

My time is running short, and I make my way shallower by traversing through the upper holds and spend a few brief moments exploring the rail cars, davits and a torpedo on the upper deck before finning to my guideline. My bottom time is maxed out, so I make a slow ascent and take an extra-long safety stop.

When I climb back on board, the boat has fallen quiet once again. It seems like we all need a moment to digest the experience. But before we can think too long, the cook swings up from the galley, cracking jokes through a smile as thick as his accent and ushering us inside for a hearty meal before we move on to drift the walls of Ras Mohammed.

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