Atalanta

Atalanta is a wreck spread around an islet rather than stacked on a single bottom. Loose timbers run along the southeast shore of Äggharu from nine to twenty metres, two hull sections of frame ribs sit close together on the southwest side, and the northwest face carries another hull section with thirty-six frames at fifteen to twenty metres, planking trailing down to twenty-two at the deepest point. There is no recognisable ship profile to follow — the dive is a careful read of frames, planking, and scatter rather than a hull circumnavigation. Plan one face per dive and brief the skipper on which approach you intend.

Two things distinguish Atalanta from the other Raasepori outer-archipelago wrecks. First, a single broken-up scatter offering both a nine-metre shallow approach and a twenty-two-metre debris dive, depending on which face you take, is unusual. Second, its identity is officially uncertain: both hylyt.net and the Finnish Heritage Agency record the vessel as assumed to be Atalanta or Atlanta, an oak sailing ship with sheet-tin cargo lost in 1855 or the 1880s-1890s, and both flag that the source of the assumption is no longer traceable.

The boat does the navigation here. There is no buoy and no descent line; the skipper sets a GPS mark from the Heritage Agency or hylyt.net coordinates and the team plans a free descent and a controlled return. Drysuit is standard May through October; bottom temperatures sit at eight to fifteen degrees even in midsummer. The single verified dive at this site recorded fifteen degrees at twelve metres on a warm late-August day with five-metre visibility — the warm end of the area calibration. Compass and SMB stay standard kit on any open-archipelago dive from a free-floating boat. The Antiquities Act is categorical: a nineteenth-century wooden wreck is automatically protected, no touching, no lifting, no anchoring on the wreck. The viable Hanko-day rotation pairs Atalanta in the morning with Gloskär afternoon and Trelänningen evening.