Narvik

Days run out of Narvik itself. The fjord arms are narrow, so boat rides are counted in minutes rather than hours and a two-dive morning still has you back on the quay by lunch; a few of the shallower sites sit close enough to the road to be walked into instead. Kit, not travel, is the limiting factor — drysuit, redundant gas for the deeper hulls and a torch even in high summer, because the light drops away faster here than the depth gauge suggests it should.

The wrecks sit on steep fjord slopes over fine silt, and they fall into two groups. Some lie bow-up or stern-up on the incline with one end inside sport limits and the other well below it, so the same hull can be a straightforward dive or a decompression one depending on how far down you follow it. The rest are on the bottom, upright or broken, and belong to teams carrying stage cylinders. Silt is the hazard both groups share: a careless fin stroke inside a hull closes the way out behind you.

What draws people is how legible the steel still is. Growth is there, but the cold and the low light keep it thin rather than smothering, so deck fittings, winches and, on some hulls, armament stay recognisable. Several of the German destroyers were scuttled or run aground by their own crews once ammunition ran out rather than being sunk outright, which is part of why they lie where they do; accounts of individual losses differ in the detail. Men died with these ships, they are treated locally as war graves, and the ethic on the boats is to look, photograph and take nothing.

It suits wreck divers with real cold-water hours and rewards technical teams most; mixed groups usually split the day, one team on a sport-depth hull while the other runs decompression on something deeper. Midsummer is the obvious window, since Narvik sits north of the Arctic Circle and the light barely stops in June and July, but only November and December fall away completely. March through May are workable and often clearer, and the dives that still happen in deep winter are for people who accept darkness at midday and ice along the fjord edges.