Five go dive the Zenobia. Cyprus October 2006.

[Mick F]

Well, actually it was six. No, I tell a lie, it was seven. Seven of us went to Cyprus to do some diving on the Zenobia. Well, actually it was six divers so I tell another lie, and as lies make baby Jesus cry, I’d better explain in full.

A few months ago Mark Powell announced on YD that he was organising a trip to Cyprus to dive the said Zenobia, and would anyone like to go. The Diving Dude signed up immediately.

Despite this, my buddy Midnight and I signed up as well, and we were all set. Flights, hotels etc all booked. All that remained was to tell Mrs. Mick I was going. Best if I just gloss over that bit to be honest.


4/10/06 Day the First. In which Midnight & Mick F find that the Ibis Hotel Heathrow has very very small rooms.

Midnight & I catch a flight from Dublin to London as the flight to Cyprus leaves early Thursday morning. After lugging my Evolution crate around, we arrive somewhat hot and moist at the Ibis Hotel Heathrow. I stand behind an American gentleman in the check-in queue as he shouts “well why can’t I pay in Euros? I’m in goddamn Europe ain’t I?” One more to add to the stereotype me thinks.

We go to the room only to find that it’s just slightly smaller than a very small thing. Bugger. Oh well, off to the bar to get pissed then.


5/10/06 Day the Second. In which Mick F meets Mark Powell, The Dude, and the High Dudesse for the first time.

We get up at silly o’clock to get to Terminal 1. We check our bags/crate in and head for security. We do a little explaining about rebreather heads to the nice bag search fellow, and he eventually lets us go through. Down to the gate & meet Mark Powell. Nice bloke for a Welshman

Onto the plane & settle down to watch some Little Britain on my PSP as I am going to be surrounded by British people for the next few days & I would like to know what to expect

Land in Larnaca to glorious sunshine & Rob from Dive Tek Cyprus collects us. We drop off the gear at the hotel & I come face to face with the Diving Dude. In the flesh! I feel humbled by the presence of the great one, but not for very long. We also get to meet the High Dudesse, so it wasn’t all bad news.

We get some kit fettled for the morning & have some dinner before retiring.

6/10/06 Day the Third. In which Mick F eventually writes about some diving

We get up early, as I had carefully set my alarm the previous night. It was agreed by all concerned that it was somewhat unfortunate I didn’t set it back two hours to Cyprus time as well, but never mind, we can’t have everything.

Kit packed, we drive to Larnaca and onto our boat, the Zenobia Queen. This is an ex London Fire Brigade tender and has a good size dive deck, decent ladder, and lots & lots of Scooby divers. The engines start & we kit up. I have my Vytec computer in gauge mode safely strapped to the top of my Evolution. I can’t reach it when kitted up so ask Midnight to undo it & give it to me. “What computer?” he asks. Boll*x, I’ve just dropped the damn thing over the side somewhere between Larnaca Marina and the Zenobia. I decide I’m not going to let it spoil my trip and carry on.

Dive one. 37.3M – 65 mins.

We drop in and I am gob smacked. The viz is at least 40M and the wreck stretches out below us. She lies on her Port side in 43M of water, a length of 172M and a beam of some 23M. She carried a cargo of 104 articulated lorries when she sank in 1980. Apparently there’s one car somewhere down there as well We drop down to the starboard side at about 16M, and continue down to the Starboard propeller. Along the hull, between the loading ramps, and through the open lorry deck. Most of the trucks lie in heaps on the bottom, but some still cling to the deck held by their safety chains. We drop around the superstructure and head into the bridge for a nose around. The wreck is remarkably intact with the Decca housing still in the bridge although lying on it’s side.

We head out of the bridge and into the restaurant. Here, the drinks dispensers and the microwave oven remains intact. We head back through the lower cabin area, much of which has collapsed leaving rows of toilets exposed like an army barracks. We meet Mark and the Dude, who are doing an advanced wreck penetration course, halfway. We exit at the rear of the superstructure & swim around the open deck before heading back to the shot.

Dive two. 33M – 58 mins.

We penetrate the upper lorry deck through cavernous doors. There are numerous lorries crashed down onto the hull below us, many fully intact with seats steering wheels etc. We exit through a small door at the end and swim out over the hull for a look back at the superstructure. Back along the open deck & off to the shot.

We eat lunch and head back to port. Unload the kit and back to the dive centre for some kit rinsing and a little fettling. I’ve had a cell reading slightly high so swap it to another position to double check whether it’s the cell or the connection. Back to the hotel in a hire car Mark has picked up. It’s a Per-Dua something or other and would have been fine if he’d gotten one for the other foot!

Back at the hotel, the Dude reveals a secret. It’s Mark’s birthday tomorrow, so he’s gotten him a card and some presents. More of this anon.

Well that’s about enough for part one. To be continued.

7/10/06 Day the Fourth. In which Mark has a surprise, and the Dude has the worst mosquito bites in the world. Ever.

We manage to get up on time this morning and I find I’ve been chewed on by half the bloody mosquitoes in Cyprus. The fcukers are so big, they’re sitting in deckchairs reading the paper by the pool. I’ve got about twenty bites & they itch like a blue b*stard. The Dude has also been bitten; twice; but they are soooooo bad. As the day goes on I actually felt sorry and wish that I had gotten those bites as well, instead of him.

At least then I wouldn’t have to listen to him fcuking whinge on all day about them

Never mind, we pickup two more compadres today. YD’s John Temp and his buddy Bob, who shall henceforth be known as "Bob". They fit right in with the same sort of debased humour as the rest of us.

Dive three. 37M – 75 mins.

As we’re fully kitted up, pre-breathed and ready to go in, some other divers barge past us and stand at the gap in the rail. When the “dive now” buzzer goes, they then start to fcuk around putting on their fins and actually getting ready to go in. One of them forgets to put his reg in & I’m strongly tempted to shove him over the side before he gets it. We eventually get in and drop down to the hull & enter the lower lorry deck through the pilot’s door. It’s as black as a witch’s tit in here and I reel off from the entry point. We dive down to the bottom of the hold and find a lorry load of sleeping bags has landed below us. I kick Midnights arse as he looks like he’s about to have a bit of a kip and on we go. We squeeze through some tight spaces and get to the end of the hold. We’ve laid 130M of line to get here and it’s a long way back, so we turn it and I get smacked on the legs by a load of scarf boards as I swim under them and they collapse. Thankfully it’s nothing heavier and the exit is otherwise uneventful. We surface to find the Dude has only had a ten minute dive thanks to a cell warning & he’s in a right mood. Same as normal then really.

On the surface, Mark gets presented with his card and presents. The only problem is that Diving Dude has gotten the day wrong, the twat! Mark swears it’s tomorrow. He swears profusely when he realises that the card is a 40th birthday one and he claims he’s only 38, but we know better. We make him wear the presents for the second dive.

Dive four. 26M – 55 mins.

We head along the bow rail for a bimble along by the lifeboats. I reckon I must be badly narked as a submarine turns up beside me. I mean a big one. Really big like. It’s also full of tourists looking at the poor bugger who has to swim like hell alongside feeding the fish so they can get their photos. The big groupers from the wreck appear and feast on just about everything else. One of them has a long hard look at me but I just give it an even harder look back.

Feeling right tough, we surface & have lunch. Two of the divers who barged past us this morning stand in front of our kit discussing rebreathers. “Nah, those things are dangerous. There’s just too many moving parts innit” I shit you not.

Back to port, shift kit & fettle a bit. I change out the high reading cell and wash the green gunk from the exhale counterlung. John & Bob thank me for putting them off rebreathers for life.

OK that’s it for the moment. The last bit will follow in due course.

8/10/06 Day the Fifth. In which Mick F is astounded at how stupid divers can be and finds out that shit really does happen.

As per usual, up early and onto the boat. I think you get the drift by now.

Dive five. 40M – 77 mins.

We’ve planned a serious one here. We’re penetrating into the engine room. This is not to be lightly undertaken as it’s dark as hell, with really tight spaces, and has claimed at least three divers in the past. We drop down and reel off from a handily placed lorry. The entrance is reached through a tunnel along the hull on the Portside. It’s beautiful but everything we touch erupts a cloud of fine rust into the water. We swim around the port engine and look up towards to starboard one, some 15M above our heads. We wind our way around fuel pipes and propshafts deeper and deeper into the wreck. Midnights crappy reel has tangled into a birds nest, so I slice and dice it until it’s free. Thankfully it has done this at an access door where I have tied my primary reel off as it ran out of line. We continue on my backup reel until we reach an area some 80/90M in and a dead end. It’s just after 30 minutes into the dive and time to turn. I turn to follow Midnight back out and it’s like diving through blood. The red dust cloud obscures everything. At one point, I can’t even see my hands on the reel. As we exit the engine room, two single cylinder divers pass us on the way in. I cannot believe this and try to dissuade them to no avail.

We reach the lorry which was my primary tie off, and I see some divers the far side of it. I think “Thank God, they’ve turned back.” I have a look around the lorry but it isn’t the original two! Four of their mates are following them in. No reels, no redundancy, no proper lights. My flabber is well and truly gasted. FFS what are these guys doing?

We head for the deco trapeze and wait until Midnights sodding VR3 eventually, begrudgingly, lets him out of the water. My Vision has long since cleared & I’m padding the stops on the way up!

We leave 6M and spend a good 5 minutes on the way to the surface.

Dive six. 31M – 64 mins.

This is the last dive and we’re going to make the most of it. We head into the bridge and up through a hole at the back into the upper cabin area. We find some forest murals intact on the walls, with intact cabins. A closet reveals neatly folded blankets and pillows near an eerily perfect shower/toilet/hand basin.

We hit a dead end and head back along the wreck towards the front of the superstructure. We duck up and down around collapsed areas until we hit another dead end. We have loads of light through the small windows, but they’re nearly all intact. The only broken ones are where bodies of divers have been removed through them in the past; A poignant reminder.

We turn around only to find three diver pushing their way past us. We’re about 40M from the nearest exit here, and yet again we find single cylinders, no lights or reels, and blind faith in their instructor/guide/dive leader. Before I get too sanctimonious I remember running out of air on a dive a few years ago, and coming up on a buddy’s octopus. None of us are perfect but I don’t think I ever achieved quite this level of stupidity either.

We leave the wreck and bimble around a small structure at the top of the open deck which appears to lead into deck two with some J size cylinders stored next door. A weird looking mottle grey slug like creature about 2-2.5M long has colonised the back of this structure. It’s time to leave so we head up to the shot and standard 3 minute stop. A nice slow ascent from here sees us back on the boat and packing up. The cover on my Evolution is now very battle scarred and looks like a proper rebreather. The Dude gets out of the water covered in oil and muck. Oh how we giggled.

We have some lunch and head back for shore. Load up the pickup and head back to base. Now at this point, we have a major suspected DCI incident. We end up in hospital and the chamber, but the individual involved has asked that he be allowed post on this himself so I will leave it there. Suffice it to say that all’s well that ends well and we all came home safely.

Days six and seven are just travel really with not much to report. On landing in Heathrow I wasn’t sure if the plane had landed or if we’d been shot down, but I would like to thank Captain Kangaroo for eventually bouncing us safely to the air bridge. It was his 40th birthday too so Mark must have felt in good company.

All in all it was a superb trip with a really nice bunch of people and I do include the Dude in that! (I’ve run out of allowed images by the way, so no more smileys for the last while) The diving was superb and Rob from Dive Tek Cyprus was spot on. Many thanks to Mark Powell for organising, although next time Mark, can you have a polite word with the mozzies and ask them to p*ss off?

Some memorable quotes from the week:

Howard (Diving Dude): ….because I do worry about looking stupid you know…..

Adrian (Midnight):…..Mick, try eating with the inside of your mouth mate…..

Mark Powell:…it’s not my birthday……

Adrian:……I wasn’t narked!

Mark:….and I am NOT forty!

John Temp:…eeeeuuuuuwwwww…….

And last but not least:

High Dudesse:….Howard, shutup!

Until next time folks. Dive safe.

[buchhawk]

Bloody hell, was just getting into it

[sexydivebuddy]

[Midnight]

Originally Posted by buchhawk

Bloody hell, was just getting into it

Always leave them wanting more!!!!!

Looking forward to episode 2........ Hope it doesn't clash with the release date one of those Hollywood Blockbuster Posts!!

Nice One Mick.

Regards
Midnight

[Mick F]

Part two posted above.

[sexydivebuddy]

[Mick F]

Tomorrow. Need sleep now

[Mark Chase]

Fantastic report cant wait for the next installmnet. Thanks for giving me a big smile before a shitty day at work.

ATB

Mark Chase

[Prometheus]

Great report'
It's nice to see that the old "London Phoenix" has found duties in sunnier climes as the Zenobia Queen, I have spent many happy hours aboard her in the past.

[paramedic paul]

Great report, as i've mentioned several times before, we're off to dive the Zenobia in May next year. How did you get on with Dive Tek? I've emailed them with a couple of questions but, as yet, not received an answer!