Ryssön fiskari

A boat trip out from Hanko Itäsatama into the outer archipelago, then a descent onto a 20-metre seabed south of the small Ryssö skerry. What you find is the catalogue card made tangible: a wooden motorboat hulk on the bottom, with vessel name, build year, length, beam and hull orientation all unrecorded. The hylyt.net entry classifies it as a moottorivene and stops there. No operator-published mooring, no buoyed shotline, no community trip report. Visibility decides the dive — typically 5 to 10 metres, less during the mid-August plankton bloom — and a drysuit decides whether it happens at all.

The framing here is honest: a small, off-programme wreck on a Finnish catalogue card with most of the structured fields blank, and a custom-arranged outing in practice. Hanko's underwater landscape is dominated by 17th-century Dutch trading wrecks, 19th-century schooners and 20th-century war casualties on the Hauensuoli buoyed-park route; a wooden working motorboat sits well below those in archaeological prominence and in operator interest. Brackish Baltic salinity around 5 to 7 ppt rules out the wood-boring shipworm, so the timber survives at all decades on. Treat the dive as a catalogue verification when the better-documented Hanko sites are unfavourable, rather than as a destination in itself.

Vessel age is unrecorded, so default to Antiquities Act compliance: no touching the timber, no anchoring on the wreck, no lifting any seabed object near it. The drysuit is the gear-side gate at 20 metres in 8-12 °C bottom water; a 7 mm wetsuit does not work here, and a tested undersuit matters as much as the suit. The site is not on any operator's published programme — a private boat, a club outing through a sukellusseura, or a custom departure arranged with Hanko Diving on m/s Atlanta is how it gets dived. Russarö's Defence Forces firing sector sits ~5 km south on a separate island; the Ryssö position is normally outside the published danger sectors, but check maavoimat.fi before any southern outer-Hanko day. Compass and primary SMB stay standard kit.