Neuenfels

Drop onto the deck. It sits at about 12 metres, which gives a long bottom time and time to work the ship properly rather than making one pass along her; the maximum depth to the bottom outside the wreck is 28 metres. She is the biggest wreck remaining in the harbour at 143.2 m, and the remains of her superstructure lie on the seabed beside the hull, blown up after she sank so that the masts and upperworks stopped being a hazard to shipping.

From the stern you can swim through the first cargo compartment, where one of the reserve propeller blades is stowed. Down at the bottom under the stern both propellers stick up out of the seabed, with the rudder beside them half sunk into the mud. Looking back along the hull from there gives the best sense of her size, and the hole torn in her plating by the torpedo hit of 10 April is still an opening worth swimming past. There are normally buoys on the wreck.

Two practical notes. The surface current over the wreck can be extremely strong, so time the entry and the return around it rather than around your gas. And the deck you are swimming along was once buried under 30 to 50 cm of mud; it cleared after Narvik Urban Council extended the industrial area and the change increased the flow between high and low water, which is a reminder that harbour works here can alter the site from one season to the next.