Activities · Destination Guide
Cold-water walls, freshwater wreck details, and Alpine shore days within reach of Munich
Pick an activity mode to compare signature sites, skill fit, and gear planning notes before you lock your trip.
Walchensee supplies the signature cold-water scenery at Galerie, Pioniertafel, Hackl, and Steinbruch, while Starnberger See adds Loewensteg training and advanced wall diving near Allmannshausen. Local schools such as RabeDiver, Tauchbasis Walchensee, TSC Starnberg, and Tauchakademie Bayern are valuable because legal entries, parking, weather, and visibility are site-specific. Expect freshwater weighting, abrupt thermoclines, dark water at depth, and walls that continue far beyond recreational limits. The reward is a compact inland destination where a shallow skills dive, an underwater-forest route, and a controlled wall profile can all fit one trip.
Broken quarrylike rock and an official exception within part of Walchensee's southshore charprotection zoning make this an important alternative, but the current map and exact boundary remain mandatory.
A familiar Starnberger See training area where local clubs build freshwater, buoyancy, navigation, and rescue skills.
Walchensee's bestknown advanced wall combines dramatic rock, depth, low light, and small submerged objects.
A steep Walchensee profile with rock and scree that rewards careful contour navigation.
A compact VW object around the midteenmeter range and submerged trees make Hackl visually distinctive without requiring the headline walls.
Operator Checklist
Book a local checkout before an advanced wall, especially after a warm-water-only interval. Confirm the current regulation, mapped entry, parking, storm warning, visibility report, and cylinder-fill hours on the morning of the dive. At Walchensee, compressed-gas diving may begin one hour before sunrise and end one hour after sunset, but it is prohibited from 22:00 to 05:00. Do not fill cylinders outdoors and respect the stated buffers around hydropower intakes and outlets. At Starnberger See, avoid solo diving, shipping lanes, landing stages, buoy fields, harbors, private structures, and seasonal nature zones. Build the first dive shallow, verify freshwater weighting, and keep a land-based fallback.
Conditions Fallback
Avoid