Last week came to an end with some of the first bouts of severe weather to hit Malta this season, and a video shared on Facebook last Friday really helped show   people what was happening just off the islands’ shores. 

Leandro Cassar, a diver who works at the St. Paul’s Bay fish farms, was on a maintenance boat with over 15 other people when strong winds and heavy rainfall hit the islands. 

“The boat was tied to the tuna cages because we were working on some maintenance there,” Leandro told Lovin Malta. “At first, a large tornado passed by close to us, so I took out my phone to record it.”

An impressive video of the tornadic waterspout itself (shot by a young Italian diver) also went viral, with large international Facebook groups like Severe Weather Europe and Meteo Real Time sharing it. That video has now amassed over a million views, but Leandro’s video showed an even closer – and more worrying – angle to it all.

The video Leandro shared, which runs just under a minute long, shows the maintenance boat suffering against the plummeting winds. At a certain point, a large rubber raft attached to the boat can be seen being thrown into their air and blown off, only to be spotted seconds later on the other side of the pen.

The crew that day was actually a pretty young one, with the oldest member being only 45 years old. Leandro himself is 32, and one of the crew was only 25 years old.

All things considered, the crew seemed mostly composed during the video.

“Storms like that are always way worse at sea, so we’ve gotten used to them by now,” Leandro told Lovin Malta. In fact, the boat did not leave after he stopped filming. “We still had work to do. After about 10 minutes of maintenance work, we collected our things and sailed back to port.”

This week has more rain, thunderstorms, and strong winds in store for Malta, so be careful out there.

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David Grech Urpani

Lovin Malta's Head of Content, Dave has been in journalism for the better half of the last decade. Prefers Instagram, but has been known to doomscroll on TikTok. Loves chicken, women's clothes and Kanye West (most of the time).