Scuba Diving in Cyprus

Tomorrow night I should leaving on my next European adventure – a long weekend in Lisbon and Sintra in Southern Portugal – but as you can imagine, that trip is off as are all others for the foreseeable future.  However,one of the nice things about Europe – we have both Good Friday and Easter Monday as bank holidays so no need to take days off!  But as I do not have any photos of that trip yet, let me take you back to my last Med holiday – my trip to Cyprus in October!

As you may recall scuba diving is one of my all time favorite activities and while almost every location and type of activity is closer living in London than New York but diving is not one of them.  As I mentioned in this post I wanted to complete my PADI Advanced Open Water Certification (so I could go down to 100 feet) and chose Ayia Napa on the East coast of Cyprus. After you have the basic PADI Open Water Certification you need to complete five more dives for the next level and while usually these are spread over three days, I did them in two.  Because I was doing my course and had to focus on things like under water navigation I didn’t take my underwater camera (you can see past diving here) but here are a few from my instructor’s go pro which hopefully will give you a better since of my scuba diving in Cyprus.

The first day was three dives and we went to some of the most famous dive spots in Ayia Napa. The first spot was the Canyon off the cost of Cape Greco National Park which after you navigate the difficult rock entry from the shore there are very interest rock formations.  The second location is simply called “The Caves” where you can dive in and out of actual caves (where it gets very dark) and you can see why many ships used to crash among these rocks.  The last spot on my first day scuba diving in Cyprus was Green Bay, one of the most famous spots on the island.  This was the most shallow of the places we went (a max depth of 10 meters / 33 feet) but a great spot home to under water statues, countless fish, and a giant sea turtle.

The second day of my Scuba Diving in Cyprus was highlight, the Zenobia.   The MS Zenobia is one of the most famous ship wrecks in the world.  The ferry sank in 1979 completed wth more than 100 cars and trucks on board and is now a mile off the shower, accessible from the Larnaca Harbour.  The ship is nearly 600 feet long and as it is so large the shallowest part is 52 feet under the Mediterranean Sea and the deepest is 126 feet down.

While that is quite deep, I did not go down to the seabed at the depends point but did go down to the propellers are located at a depth of around 25-27m .  We did two dives here and while I likely should not have worn a fashion swimsuit (you can find it here) but as it was completely covered by a thick wet suit, I was fine! (And after the fourth dive, the one where I blew through my air because I was so excited about the wreck, he still told me I was “more than qualified”) Take a look:

Would you want to go Scuba Diving in Cyprus?