A few years ago, I decided to take my 3 sons on a Discover Scuba Diving experience at Coral Bay Divers. They loved it and so did I and I came out of the water thinking “I live on an island – why on earth did it take me 24 years to take my first scuba dive?”

Crazy I know!

Whenever I was in Paphos I continued to dive and soon reached 25 dives, but only down to about 12 metres.

Last summer I decided that I wanted to strike one thing off my “Bucket List” a dive down to the world-famous wreck, the Zenobia, so last summer, accompanied by my eldest and youngest sons, we started our PADI Open Water training with Jurg.

Our training was first in the pool, then in the sea with us putting into practice the things we had learnt and having a lot of fun as well and off we went diving again to 18 metres.

A few weeks later, the three of us turned up at Coral Bay Divers again to start our PADI Advanced Open Water course. It’s advancing your diving knowledge and skills – building on what we had learnt before.

We had the choice of many different dives and after choosing 4, Jurg asked us what we would like to do for our fifth one. “NIGHT DIVE!!” said my boys in unison and so the final dive of the course was planned and off we went the next night to the Amphitheatre dive site near Coral Bay.

I can honestly say two things.

Firstly, falling back into pitch black water was certainly an experience and secondly, I have never seen so much marine life than what I did that dive! Amongst the things we saw were lobster, sea cucumbers, trumpet fish, barracuda, crab, octopus, squid and much more – it really was amazing and something I had never experienced before.

We passed and nothing was holding me back now – Zenobia here I come!

One early morning a couple of weeks later we headed down to Larnaca from Nicosia and boarded the ship that would take us to the Zenobia, along with about 30 other divers.

Pre-dive check done and we jumped into the water and then once we were all ready, it was time to deflate our BCD’s and go down.

That’s One ******* Big Ship! is the first though that came to mind.

Diving down to the Zenobia was certainly an experience and the abundance of marine life around it was incredible too – the lion fish we saw were beautiful, but the best was the turtle at over 1 metre long that wanted to play with us and even tried to eat the GoPro camera Jurg had!

I can honestly say that it was one of the most wonderful experiences I have ever had in my 52 years and one that I am going to repeat over and over again.

What made it even better was doing the courses with two of my sons – I was smiling all the time underwater during our training as I was so proud of my sons.

Going down with them to the Zenobia was just the most wonderful feeling.