Sunday’s Recreational Dive on the Zenobia at Larnaca

Captain Paris on the M/Y Kaith II

 

The diving was from Captain Paris Eleftheriou’s boat, the M/Y Kaith II.

The boat’s scheduled 9:00 a.m. start ended up a bit later with the last minute things, getting peoples gear organized etc. but the anchoring point over the Zenobia is only 1.4 km from harbor so there is lots of time.

I used my wife’s Suunto Mosquito dive computer as on the previous day I had experimented with my Suunto D9 in Gauge Mode but forgot that once used in Gauge mode it locks you out of using it as a regular decompression dive computer for 48 hours after your last dive. In the future I’ll stick with using it as a regular dive computer!

The water was comfortable on the surface at 23 degrees with a thermocline at 20 meters dropping the temperature to 19 degrees. The visibility is at least 20 meters and you can see the outline of the wreck which starts 18 meters down from the surface. There is a tourist glass bottom boat that goes out to the wreck also and a submarine but the submarine wasn’t operating.

The Zenobia is on its side on the bottom. The bottom is 40 meters down. When it sank all the cargo and trucks slid down to the bottom with a few things still hanging by the chains.

We went down and through the main cargo bay, there were semi-trailers (articulated lorries in British English) littering the bottom. Quite a sight. Once in this cargo bay you can see the light at the exit as you swim through though it is quite dark inside. It is a huge area, end to end must be 50 meters long and nearly 15 meters high. It is a tight squeeze getting out, but I didn’t have much problem, some people do.

 

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This video gives some good shots of the wreck. I did not penetrate inside like they do. That is a whole different kind of diving.

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