Istria and the Kvarner

The northern Adriatic is shallow, clear and — for divers — mostly about wrecks. Its life is thin compared to the Mediterranean further south, but the visibility is good, the water is calm, and the twentieth century left a great deal on the bottom.

Two wars did most of it. The Austro-Hungarian Navy's main base was Pula, at the tip of Istria, and the minefields laid to protect it in August 1914 claimed the Baron Gautsch within a fortnight of the war beginning — the worst civilian shipping disaster in Adriatic history. Thirty years later the same waters took the TA35, an Italian destroyer turned German torpedo boat, also to a mine. The Lina is the odd one out: a peacetime loss, an Italian timber freighter that ran onto Cres in fog in January 1914, seven months before the war began.

Krnica, on the east coast of Istria, has its own house reefs — the Reef, the Beach, Kebal — within reach of the wrecks.