Naeroyfjord Cold Water Dive

Gudvangen · Vestland · Norway

The Naeroyfjord is barely 250 metres wide at its narrowest point, a crack in the Norwegian landscape where mountains rise more than a kilometre straight out of the water on both sides. UNESCO inscribed it as part of the West Norwegian Fjords World Heritage Site, and from above it is a postcard of waterfalls and green cliffs. From below the waterline it becomes something stranger and more challenging, a stratified world where glacial meltwater and Atlantic salt water coexist in uneasy layers. I entered from a rocky shore near Gudvangen on a still June morning. The surface was flat calm, reflecting the mountains so perfectly that the boundary between air and water seemed theoretical rather than real. The first three metres were a milky green soup, glacial silt suspended in the freshwater lens that overlay the fjord. Visibility was perhaps a metre. I could see my computer and nothing else. It was like descending into cream. At five metres I hit the halocline. The transition was not gradual. One moment I was in green murk, the next the water shimmered, rippled as if I were passing through a horizontal waterfall, and then cleared to reveal ten metres of visibility in dark, cold, saline water. The temperature dropped three degrees in the span of a single body length. Below the halocline the fjord wall appeared, granite and gneiss covered in plumose anemones that glowed white in my torch beam. Dead man's fingers soft corals grew in dense clusters from every ledge, their stubby white branches giving the rock the appearance of being dusted with frost. I followed the wall down to twenty metres where the light from the surface was reduced to a faint green glow. Edible crabs crouched in crevices, their shells encrusted with barnacles and algae. Nudibranchs in colours that seemed too vivid for this monochrome environment, bright orange and electric white, crawled across the sponge-covered rock. A school of pollock hung in the water column, materialising and disappearing as they moved in and out of my torch beam. The profound feature of diving in Naeroyfjord is the silence and the scale. The mountains above the surface compress the sky into a narrow strip of blue, and below the surface the walls drop away into darkness that my torch could not penetrate. At thirty metres I stopped and looked up. The halocline shimmered above me like a false ceiling, the milky freshwater layer glowing faintly with diffused daylight. Below me the fjord floor was invisible, somewhere hundreds of metres down in permanent darkness. I hung between these two worlds for a long moment before beginning my ascent through the shimmer and back into the green.