Pakri Peninsula Wrecks

Paldiski · Harju County · Estonia

The Pakri Peninsula juts into the Gulf of Finland from Estonia's northwestern coast, a dramatic slab of Ordovician limestone rising in sheer cliffs above a shallow, wreck-strewn seabed. For most of the Cold War the nearby town of Paldiski was a closed Soviet naval city, home to a nuclear submarine training facility and off-limits to civilians. That military past has left its mark both on shore, in the form of crumbling concrete bunkers and reactor buildings, and underwater, where naval vessels and wartime transports litter the seabed alongside much older merchant wrecks. I joined a dive boat out of Paldiski harbour on a grey August morning, the limestone cliffs of Pakri Cliff looming to the north like a fortress wall. Our first site was a WWII-era German transport vessel sitting upright on a sandy bottom at 22 metres. The descent through the green Baltic water was like entering a different century. The wreck appeared as a dark mass below, her hull plates buckled amidships but the bow section remarkably intact. I swam along the port rail, running my light over deck fittings still bolted in place, their surfaces coated in a fine fur of mussel spat and hydroids. The cargo holds were open and empty, long since salvaged, but the engine room remained a tangle of machinery frozen in time. Pipes, valve wheels, and gauge housings protruded from the gloom in every direction. A school of Baltic herring had taken up residence in the hold, their silver sides flashing in my torch beam as they turned in unison. Round gobies, the invasive species that has colonised much of the Baltic in recent decades, watched from every horizontal surface with their absurdly large heads and bulging eyes.