Eggo

Descent is on the operator's buoy line set onto the wreck, not a free drop — the hull is hard to find without it in 1-5 metre Baltic green. The first thing the line resolves out of the gloom is the high port-side deck edge at 28 metres, where the 47 metre cargo steamer lies tilted about 50 degrees to starboard with her bow pointing southwest. From there the deck steps down through the open tops of the two forward cargo holds, coal still aboard a century after the sinking, to the mud bottom at 32 metres on the starboard side. The wheelhouse sits aft at the stern. The standing mast with its rigging rises off the high side and is the live entanglement hazard the dive turns around — keep clear of it, do not swim through it. Outer plating and wheelhouse walls have been perforating in recent years; the lifeboat that lay alongside the stern until 2003 is gone, and only a boat-shaped depression in the mud marks where it was. The responsible profile is a slow circuit outside the structure on a planned recreational bottom time at the AOW depth ceiling.

Eggo is Hanko's "second deep wreck" — the obvious next target after the buoyed Hauensuoli route, and the depth and history step up from the 17th-century oak vessels there without committing to Eira's 47-metre tech-leaning profile. The hull is mid-sized and intact enough to read as a ship rather than as a debris field, and the brackish Baltic's no-shipworm condition is why a 1913-built steel steamer still has recognisable plating, holds, deck and wheelhouse a hundred and four years on. The site sits in outer-archipelago water that goes diveable on calm days and unreachable on most others, which is part of the appeal — the trip lives or dies on the morning forecast.

The vessel was built in 1913 at Koch's shipyard in Lübeck for the Hamburg-Bremen-Amerika-Linien, German Hamburg-Bremen-America Line, and had sailed under the names Mehedya and Herrmann Heinrich before becoming Eggo. On the night of 10-11 November 1921 she struck bottom somewhere south of Jussarö while carrying coal for Lojo Kalkverk to Tammisaari. The leak was assessed as small, and she made Hästö-Busö waters under her own steam with the pumps clearing the inflow. The rescue vessel Freja sent down a diver who found and patched a single small hole amidships in the bottom plating, and Eggo continued toward Tammisaari under pilot Emil Falk with Freja in escort. At 10:45 near Kummelharu she was already 25 degrees to port; the captain proposed grounding her in shallow water but the rudder no longer responded. She rolled over and sank in seconds. Freja recovered nine — including the customs officer and pilot Falk — and seven men were lost: Captain Hess, First Engineer Arens, Second Mate Beelendorf, Cook Hamm and stokers Krüger, Volle and Jentsch, four of them Hamburg men with families. The probable cause was either a second undetected hole or a coal-cargo shift in moderate seas. The wreck was located in 1985 and ownership passed to private divers, who gradually dismantled it in the pre-protection era — items recovered from the holds included numerous full cognac bottles from the Prohibition smuggling trade. Eggo crossed the 100-year Antiquities Act threshold in 2021, and that era is now historical.

Build the trip around the weather window. Hanko Diving runs Eggo as a deeper excursion when the outer-archipelago conditions allow, and the boat will redirect to sheltered Hauensuoli sites on a marginal forecast — book with flexibility and treat the cancellation as part of the planning. Bring all gas ready-filled: there is no compressor in Hanko, the boat carries only very limited spare equipment, and 12 L 200 bar air rentals require prior reservation. EAN28-31 extends bottom time within recreational limits at 28-32 metres and is worth arranging before the trip. Drysuit competence is the binding skill, not the AOW certification stamp. The mast and rigging are the live underwater hazard; the degrading outer plating is the second one. Antiquities Act compliance is categorical: no entry, no touching, no recovery, no anchoring on the wreck. The historical cognac-bottle stories belong to the pre-2021 era — none of that is allowed today.