Bengtskär

Rosala & Bengtskär Booking Office, ☏ +358 40-2182-960, info@bengtskar.fi. (updated Dec 2017)

History:

The area north of Bengtskär is full of low rocks, very hard to see in the night, at reduced visibility or in ice. When winter traffic with steamships between Stockholm and Hanko began in the 1870s, the need for a lighthouse became more and more apparent. There had been several plans for a lighthouse, but no final decision, when S/S Helsingfors was shipwrecked in the area in 1905. The next year the lighthouse was built, partly using granite from the skerry itself. The light and the huge lenses were made in Paris.

A replica of a jakt (small sailing ship) used to bring building material to the skerry, Eugenia, can be seen in (and sailed from) Västanfjärd, Kasnäs or Dalsbruk in Kimitoön. The original's skipper famously refused to install a motor, so it was one of the last three pure sailing ships in the ship register in the 1950s.

The lighthouse had a crew of five: the master, three keepers and a mist signal operator. With them came their families; in 1910 there were 22 persons living on the skerry.

The lighthouse was evacuated for World War I. During the war two German cruisers fired at the lighthouse, but damages were small.

The normal way of getting in is with cruises from Kasnäs, Kimitoön, via the Viking centre on Rosala, or from Hanko. Usually the cruises are sold as packages with meals, guiding etc. included.

Visitors with their own vessels are welcomed (call in advance to check details), but the skerry is in the hard-to-navigate outer archipelago and there is no safe harbour, so visits are possible only in calm weather. Using the jetty must not interfere with cruise or service traffic. If coming from the sea, you might want to make a call to the coast guard, although there should usually not be any formalities if arriving from a Schengen port (if arriving from Russia or from outside the Baltic, go via a customs port). The boating chart series do not cover the outer archipelago, so you have to buy the normal chart (nr 22, possibly also 24; the small scale overview chart is not enough).