Narvik

A week diving around Narvik, inside the Arctic Circle, with Dive Norway. The fjords here are full of wrecks, most of them from the battles of April 1940, when German destroyers fought the Norwegian and British navies in the Ofotfjord. It was a memorable trip for all the right and wrong reasons.

Getting there set the tone. Every leg on the way out, via Copenhagen and Oslo, ran late, and we landed at Harstad/Narvik after half past ten at night, in broad daylight. This far north in late June the sun never sets.

Then there was the weather. Northern Norway was unusually hot that week. Sitting on the boat before a dive, the computer read up to 27 °C, while the water at depth never got above 8 °C and dropped to 5 °C on the deepest dives. On the two dives of 28 June that was a 22 °C swing between kitting up in the sun and the bottom of the fjord.

Underwater it was wreck after wreck, though the visibility got steadily worse as the week went on. The heat and round-the-clock sun set off a plankton bloom that turned the water greener and murkier every day. On the wrecks there were hull plating and ribs furred with growth, a porthole with its chain still hanging alongside, signal lamps, a crate of ammunition, a teapot, old bottles among the anemones, shell casings, and engine rooms lit up by our torches. The deepest dive went to 45 m on the Georg Thiele, down by her propeller, looking back up the wreck towards her bow, which still breaks the surface. Between the wrecks an Atlantic wolffish sat on the bottom showing off its teeth. Topside there were rivers of snowmelt pouring off the mountains, the midnight sun, and that same bow of the Georg Thiele from the boat. She was run aground in Rombaksbotn in April 1940.

Getting home was the other half of the story. The flight back to Oslo left more than five hours late. The SAS pilots’ strike began the next morning, 4 July, and we finally got home on Norwegian into Gatwick instead of Manchester.