El Mina Wreck

Most plans drop down a buoy line into a wall of metal at 18 metres. The hull lies on her port side, deck plates angled away into the blue, and the standard route works from the deepest point upward: stern first, propeller and rudder on sand at 30-32m, then forward along the hull past the blast hole that opened her near the bow. The blast hole is the unmissable feature, jagged-edged and large enough to peer into, the original wound that sank the ship. From there the route enters the bridge area, where the resident glassfish school fills the superstructure as a slow, shifting cloud you can swim gently into and look back through. Beyond the bridge sits the bow with the forward anti-aircraft gun, still mounted and pointing skyward, surrounded by winches, cable rolls, and the torpedo-like minesweeping gear that gave her class its name. Lionfish hunt along the deck edges. Bullet holes pattern the plating. A line tied off the stern runs across to the smaller fishing-boat wreck at 15-18m for divers continuing the combined circular route.

Three things separate this wreck from anything else inside Hurghada day-boat range. The first is what it is. El Mina is a war-grave minesweeper hit by rockets and machine-gun fire, and the damage is right there to read on the hull: the blast hole, the bullet patterns, the AA gun pointed where the attacking aircraft came from. Hurghada's other accessible war wrecks (Rosalie Moller, Thistlegorm) demand long offshore trips or a liveaboard. The second is proximity. Boat ride from the marina is short, with operator pickups from Hurghada, Makadi Bay, El Gouna, and Sahl Hasheesh. The third is the contrast. The interior of the bridge, where weapons and command equipment used to sit, has filled with a soft, dense school of small fish that move as one body around your bubbles. Operators describe gently pushing through the cloud as a defining moment of the dive, and the visual contrast between the AA gun outside and the glassfish curtain inside is the photograph divers come back with.

Her name was El Minya, and she was a Soviet-built T-43 class ocean minesweeper of the Egyptian Navy, pennant 302, around 58 metres long and 580 tons. Egypt's T-43s were named after governorates, so she sailed alongside sisters called Sharkia, Dakahlia, Assiut, Beheira and Gharbia; Minya is the governorate on the Nile south of Cairo. Soviet naval registries list her transfer to Egypt in 1956 and her loss as "sunk by Israeli fighters 6.02.1970 in Hurghada".1

She died as a reprisal. On the night of 5 February 1970 Egyptian frogmen operating out of Aqaba slipped into Eilat harbour and fixed limpet mines to two Israeli vessels, sinking the auxiliary Bat Galim and damaging the landing craft Bat Sheva. The Israeli response came the following afternoon: from 16:00 on 6 February, eighteen A-4 Skyhawks of 102, 109 and 115 Squadrons arrived over the Hurghada anchorage in pairs, in an operation the Israeli Air Force recorded as Zikukit B. The first pair's bombs fell into the sea alongside her. The second scored a direct hit that hurt her without sinking her, and her captain then did something worth remembering: he ran her alongside a civilian ship and held station there, using it as a shield, and the circling pairs would not bomb through it. Minutes passed. Judging the attack over, he pulled away and made for the harbour mouth, and four more pairs came down on him and missed. The last three did not. She took repeated hits, heeled onto her side and sank.23

How many men died with her is disputed and neither side's figure is independently confirmed: Israeli accounts say around eighty, Egyptian accounts five.2 That people died is not in dispute, and it is why operators brief this wreck as a war grave that warrants a quiet, no-touch approach.

The name every briefing uses, El Mina, is a corruption. She was named for Minya, the governorate on the Nile south of Cairo,4 in the same series that gave her sisters Sharkia, Dakahlia and Gharbia. Somewhere in the passage from naval register to dive-boat briefing the name slid into El Mina, which in Arabic reads as "the harbour" — a fit so neat for a ship lying at a harbour entrance that it has outlived the truth. Divers have called her that for decades, and the wrecks she rests among are still known by whatever name stuck.

This is a daily wreck trip, not a project dive. Pickup-to-return windows from operator boats run roughly 8 am to 4 pm including hotel transfer, equipment, and lunch. The site is busy with multiple operators on rotation, so vigilant ascent procedures matter and an SMB is sensible. Currents are the variable to watch. Most days are calm, which is why this is the standard fallback when Abu Nuhas trips blow out, but a northerly current can run strong without much warning, and the lee of the deck is the place to wait it out. Penetration is not necessary and not recommended without wreck training and proper kit. Several operator accounts warn that live ammunition may be scattered on the seabed around the wreck, and standard wreck discipline applies regardless. Nitrox is worth having for the deeper stern passes. Visibility runs around 10m on a typical day and is partly independent of season because of harbour-edge sediment, so a torch helps with the bridge interior and the fishing-boat-side sand swim if you continue the combined route.