Capitan Antonio, Santa Caterina

The dive

The Capitan Antonio was a small bulk carrier launched in 1970 and lost in 1987, driven ashore in a violent storm with a cargo of iron bars. She was 93.55 m long and 14.82 m in the beam, and what is left of her lies off Santa Caterina dello Ionio, on the Calabrian Ionian coast, in no more than 12 m of water. The hull is in three pieces. La Cabana, the dive centre at Caminia that runs the site, says bow and stern both still break the surface; the middle section has collapsed to an outline on the sand, and the stern lies about thirty metres from the rest.

That shallowness is the whole character of the dive. Bottom time is effectively unlimited, so a full circuit of a ship that long is a normal single dive rather than a project, and parts of the wreckage can be penetrated. Megale Hellas gives 6 to 12 m and rates it low difficulty, open to first-level Open Water divers and to children, and lists it for snorkelling and freediving as well as scuba. The regional tourism board records it simply as an old merchant ship lying 12 m down off Santa Caterina.

The steel has been a reef for four decades. Dense shoals of damselfish and small baitfish hang over the plates, with red mullet, sea bream and white seabream working the sand around them; spirograph worms and anemones have colonised the flat surfaces, and octopus, moray, hermit crabs and nudibranchs live in the wreckage. Its neighbours on this stretch of coast are two more wrecks, the Kingdom stranded between Santa Caterina and Guardavalle and the deeper Cosala off Badolato Marina at 44 to 55 m, so the area is usually dived as a wreck circuit.

• A 93 m hull in 12 m of water, circumnavigable on one dive
• Bow and stern sections still breaking the surface
• Stern lying about thirty metres clear of the rest
• Dense shoals of damselfish and baitfish over the plates
• Octopus, moray, hermit crabs and nudibranchs in the wreckage

Conditions

A shallow, sheltered Ionian wreck dive with effectively unlimited bottom time. Sandy bottom, structure that starts at the surface, and enough fish over the plates that the local centres use it as a first wreck for newly certified divers.

On current: Sources agree on the shallow end of the site but not on how shallow: Archeomedia and the operator descriptions describe bow and stern as reaching or breaking the surface, and give the wreck as lying between 3 and 12 m, while Megale Hellas quotes 6 to 12 m. The deepest figure everyone gives is 12 m. No source read for this page publishes a visibility figure or a current for the site.