Le Grec

The wreck sits 1,600 m from shore in the pass between Port-Cros and Porquerolles, and finding her is the first problem: she is small and hard to locate, and the boats that dive her work off their own marks. The dive itself runs between 35 m and 47 m, which fixes its shape — a short bottom time on the structure, then an ascent with decompression stops built into the plan.

She is a 53 m steamer and largely intact: the corridors and holds, the winch, the funnel and the propeller are the features to work through. The mast has come down and lies over to port, as the Donator's has. Red gorgonians have colonised the steel, with shoals of fish over her, groupers and morays in the structure, and pelagic hunters passing through the blue.

She was built at Dundee in 1912 and worked the Newfoundland coast until 1941, running the coastal service tied to the island's railway and joining the spring seal hunts; in 1931 she picked up survivors from the Viking. Sold on to British and then Greek owners, she was flying the Panamanian flag with a Greek crew when a mine sank her here in 1945 — which is where the French name comes from. The Hyères roadstead and islands hold roughly 40 ancient wrecks and 15 modern ones.