The Thistlegorm’s forgotten sister in the same story: bombed by the same squadron two nights later, sunk in the same anchorage, and left almost perfectly intact in 50m — which is why almost nobody sees her.
This wreck is a grave
Two of her crew were never recovered. The ship is their grave.
She was launched on the Clyde in 1910 as the Francis, spent two decades in the coal trade, and was sold in 1931 to the Moller Line of Shanghai, who renamed her Rosalie Moller and kept her under the British flag.
In October 1941 she was anchored in the Strait of Gubal at Safe Anchorage H, loaded with Welsh coal, waiting for the Suez Canal to clear — exactly the situation that had already killed the Thistlegorm two nights earlier, a few miles away.
On the night of 7 October the same German squadron came back looking for what was left of the convoy. A single bomb hit her number three hold. She stayed afloat for several hours and went down at 01:40 on 8 October. Two of her crew were never found.
Because she sank slowly and upright, she is intact in a way the Thistlegorm is not: masts standing, decks readable, the starboard anchor still deployed where it was dropped in 1941. She sits at 45–50m, which puts her beyond recreational limits and has kept her almost untouched.
For qualified technical divers, this is the best wreck in the northern Red Sea — better preserved than the Thistlegorm and without the crowd. For everyone else it is a wreck to read about rather than dive, and there is no shame in that.
This is planning and history, not a dive briefing. Conditions change; your guide on the day is the authority. Diving emergency numbers and the coast’s recompression chambers are on our emergency contacts page.
Two pinnacles north-east of Giftun with a dramatic drop-off, long known for moray eels and for currents that decide the dive plan.
A shallow reef at the mouth of the Gulf of Suez that has claimed at least four ships — the Giannis D, Carnatic, Chrisoula K and Kimon M — all divable in a day.
A British armed merchant ship sunk by air attack in 1941, still holding its wartime cargo of motorcycles, trucks and rifles. Widely considered one of the best wreck dives in the world.
Hurghada’s house reefs: a cluster of sheltered sites in a protected area, where most of the coast’s divers make their first Red Sea dive.
A British war freighter still loaded with the equipment of an army that never received it — motorcycles, trucks, rifles and two railway locomotives — and the best-known wreck dive in the world outside Truk Lagoon.
The most photographed wreck at Abu Nuhas, and the most disorienting: the whole stern section lies canted hard over, so every corridor inside it runs at an angle your inner ear refuses to accept.
A Victorian P&O steamer that has been on the reef since 1869, so thoroughly colonised that her ribs now read as architecture rather than as a ship. The oldest wreck dived on this coast.
The one carrying Italian floor tiles, still stacked in the holds forty years later. The shallowest and most forgiving wreck at Abu Nuhas, and the one novice wreck divers should meet first.
Carrying lentils from Turkey to India when she hit the reef in 1978. The deepest and least visited of the Abu Nuhas wrecks, because she sits where the weather does.
Hurghada’s standard day trip, and for good reason: proper coral gardens in a protected area, 45 minutes out of the marina.
The town guide for Hurghada