Russarön pohjoispuolen hylky 1

Boat out from Hanko Itäsatama, round Russarö's north shore, and drop to a 20 m sand bottom where a wooden hull lies partly buried. The barge form is clear up close: two empty cargo holds open to the water column, hull shape still recognisable, nothing left of the rigging or superstructure. Move along one side and look down into the holds rather than into them — the timber is fragile and the Antiquities Act is categorical. Visibility decides the dive. A calm day in late June or September shows the hull as a whole; mid-August plankton or a SW blow shows it in pieces.

The honest framing is that this is one option in a multi-wreck Russarö-direction boat day, not a destination on its own. The Heritage Agency dating is historiallinen, ei määritelty — historical, era undefined — with no vessel name, no build year and no sinking story on file. The site was first detected during a Finnish Maritime Administration multibeam-sonar survey in 2007 and reported the same year by the Border Guard. The Heritage Agency alternative name is lotja, Finnish for barge, which the hull form fits. The brackish Baltic's no-shipworm condition is why a wooden hull of unknown age still reads as a barge rather than as scattered timbers.

Confirm the firing notice first. The site sits inside the Russarö Defence Forces protection zone, and a single rolling notice on maavoimat.fi can close it on the morning of the dive. Drysuit certification with a tested undersuit is the working baseline at 20 m in this water; a 7 mm wetsuit is not appropriate. Carry compass, primary SMB and torch — outer-archipelago boat traffic makes an SMB on ascent essential. Antiquities Act compliance is categorical: no entry into the holds, no touching, no lifting of seabed objects near the wreck. The better-known Flying Dutchman is the NW-side site, and the Ryssö Fiskari motorboat sits on a different island ~2 km away, outside the firing sector.