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.

The vessel was a Soviet T-43 class minesweeper, around 58 metres long and 580 tons, transferred from the USSR to Egypt in the 1950s. The sinking date is genuinely uncertain across the sources available. The most detailed operator account places it on 6 February 1970, during the War of Attrition, with Israeli fighter jets making multiple attack runs and refuelling between sorties. Other accounts give the same general 1970 timeframe but without specific dates, and one operator dates the sinking to 6 October 1973, the opening day of the Yom Kippur War. None of the sources cite a primary military record or contemporary news archive, so the spread reflects the limits of the diving-side documentation rather than a decision between two known-good options. What every account agrees on is the cause: hit by rocket fire, then machine-gunned before going down. The Arabic name El Mina means "the harbour", fitting given where she came to rest. Hurghada-based divers note that the wreck reads more deeply once you know the history behind it, and operators today brief it explicitly as a war grave that warrants a quiet, no-touch approach.

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. Aggregated sources 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.