RoRo ferry Zenobia, Cyprus - IMAGE INTENSIVE.

OK, it's been a while since we posted a ship wreck exploration report so here's another one just to "ring the changes". Hope you like it.


The Zenobia was a Swedish built roll-on-roll-off ferry built back in the late 1970's and launched in June 1980. She sank on her maiden voyage barely a mile off Larnaca harbour in Cyprus. At the time of her sinking she was carrying more than 100 fully loaded trucks and trailers most of which were chained to her decks - many still are. She sits on her side in 42 metres. She has two vehicle decks and some quite extensive passenger areas including cabins and a large cafeteria. Unlike most ro-ro ferries Zenobia embarked AND disembarked her vehicles utilising a circular one way traffic flow system both in and out through her huge stern doors which had swivelling ramps in order to allow berthing alongside rather than the more conventional nose or stern in arrangement.


On Saturday June 7th. 1980 at 2.30 AM she sank. The cause has never officially been revealed however as always numerous conspiracy theories abound, the most popular being an insurance scam and Israeli or Arab special forces sabotage! The most likely reason however was a major malfunction in her computerised ballast tank pumping system which apparently caused her to ship water uncontrollably into the port side ballast tanks causing a progressive list until she eventually keeled over and sank port side first - the computer in question must have been using Windows!

The wreck is a really short hop out from the moorings in Larnaca and you seem to be over her before you've even had time to assemble your kit! The visibility on all of the dives was great - never less than around 25 to 30 metres although it was a little bit hazy. The wreck however is very clean with little in the way of silt to kick up, quite unlike most of the wrecks in UK waters, so penetration conditions are ideal. In total we completed 6 dives on the wreck including a lot of very extensive penetration. The bottom vehicle deck is cavernous and goes on seemingly forever - when you are half way into this huge black void a bailout cylinder bigger than 10 litres suddenly seems most desirable! Imagine if you can swimming slowly along in a wide open empty space, the floor of the wreck several meters below you, a steel wall above your head, in pitch blackness with only your torch for light, a tiny green glowing pin point which is your exit seemingly a thousand miles away in the distance - all the tiny little niggles begin - will my unit be OK? Will it get a fault today? Is my CO2 absorbent soda lime packed correctly? What if my torch josses out? If I bail out now will my 1 get me back?!! Oh but the whispers take a hold of you seriously in situations like these! Lee, our guide, took us through the engine room, up a lift shaft, through the passenger areas and most of the bridge and associated control rooms. We also saw the "egg wagon", the "meat wagon" and the wreck's huge bow thruster.

Below the bridge we went into the Zenobia's officers' mess via a corridor leading off the paint locker. Here we found a radar unit lying on it's side which I mistook initially for an arcade game. If it had been an arcade game though it was the most "knobby" one I have ever come across! Only after several seconds did the penny finally drop and I realised what I was looking at! Later inspection of some photographs from the internet confirmed my suspicions as you will see from the photographs. I must say it gives me an enormous thrill to be able to identify a specific piece of the wreck so irrefutably after the dive! The tartan carpet on the cafeteria floor is still very readily apparent within the wreck despite the long immersion it has had to endure however due to the fact that the Zenobia lies on her side the floor is now the wall and it's a little odd to see tartan flock wallpaper! Again a week or two after we came home, we were able to find a photograph identifying what we had seen on the wreck.

The photos...​

Well I hope you enjoyed that... thanks for looking ​

Sank on its maiden voyage?! Theres ya bleedin luck!
Nice report that...

you guys get about about a bit dont you?
wouldnt catch me down there!
nice to see something so different!

now that is ace!!! 42 meters blimey..how long did you have down there then? i remember deco time well..!

Excellent report, very different. Thanks for posting.

I checked and my log book says:

14-06-08 Dive 1

39.9metres, 53 minutes. 1 stop of 1 minute at 22 metres on ascent.

Dive 2 (this dive).

40 metres, 51 minutes. 2 minutes deco at 12 metres.

Surface interval was 90 minutes so we hit the water before the bubble blowers and came out seriously after them. It appears we didn't hit the seabed at 42 after all, just got close!

VIVA la rebreather!!!

Nice report, great location, although your comments on other divers seems to sum up whats wrong with the sport.

Great report, what were the tanks you carried then if you were on Rebreathers?

night crawler said:

Great report, what were the tanks you carried then if you were on Rebreathers?

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Thanks mate!

The tanks... OK... you ready for this?

Most of the malfunctions/faults which can occur with a closed circuit rebreather can be overcome by driving it manually, even a failure of the O2 injection regulating computer. But one fault condition cannot be dealt with other than by a total "bail out" from the loop of the rebo to a completely independant backup. This is the possibility of a loop flood - caused by a hole in one of your breathing hoses or a counter lung tear from snagging on metal etc., or by the possibility of an o ring breaking in the mouthpiece or by a high pressure supply hose bursting. The other possibility is a mouthpiece hose collapse which leads to an impedance to the flow of gas to your mouthpiece, again very rare but not unknown as TJ will attest!

In a loop flood the rebreather fills up with sea water which reacts with the soda lime CO2 scrubbing chemical causing it to foam. It's known as a "caustic cocktail" and the upshot of it is, not only are you potentiallty trying to breath sea water if the flood is catastrophic but you are also taking in a caustic foam into your mouth and potentially your lungs.

In such a situation you have no option but to come off "the loop" and breath from a seperate SCUBA rig (SCUBA is an acronym for: Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) which has hopefully enough gas of an appropriate mix to get you to the surface INCLUDING any deco stops you will need to carry out on the way. That is a very tall order and in all honesty a 10 litre bail out such as we were carrying on that dive is rather iinadequate. Imagine the shock of having to deal with a bail out - it means you go through your gas like wildfire and I saw a 7L from 20 metres sucked down from 200 BAR to 120 BAR in the time it took to make a rather too fast ascent when TJ got a hose collapse on a dive in Scotland!

I say a gas mix appropriate to your depth in the bail out... you would use a mix which is air with a higher than normal percentage of oxygen which scrubs disolved nitrogen from your body tissues faster than ordinary air with the result that deco time is shorter. BUT... and it's a big but, an increased O2 percentage beyond a certain partial pressure vs. your operating depth becomes dangerous and will cause fatal convulsions. So on a dive deeper than 50 metres you would actually have to have a bail out mix which is leaner in O2 percentage than surface air! That would make your deco time much longer, not shorter, so you would then carry TWO bailouts cylinders, one with the lean so called "bottom mix" and one with a very high O2 percentage that you could swop to at an appropriate safe depth. I would tend to use a 50% mix and swop at 20 metres which would massively accelerate my deco time. But because I'm much shallower by the time I swop then the second bail out with the high O2 would be in a much smaller cylinder.

On a rebo we are also able to get at the "diluent" mix cylinder on the rebreather frame's side seperately to "the loop" so we could have as much as 2 to 2 and a half litres of extra bottom mix on top of the bottom mix bail out cylinder. So that 10L just became as much as a 12 1/2L.

A further use of the bailout is to gain you a "sanity break" if something goies wrong on your rig. Often the first sign of a problem is a squalling alarm and frankly it makes your blood freeze when you hear it In such a case you would grab your SCUBA mouthpiece, close the "gag" on your rebo, spit out the gag and take on your bailout so that you can assess the problem knowing that you are safe. Once you know what is wrong on your rig you can revert to the gag and drive the rebo manually or do what ever else is required thus preserving your bail out incase the situation worsens. That has gained you time to begin your ascent knowing you are safe.

At the end of the day diving is all about calculating carefully and then minimising risks as far as is practicable. If one of us had a loop failure (which is thankfully very rare) then we would bail to our own scuba and breath that down to 15 BAR or so as we ascend then swop to our partner's bailout to finish the deco. All this sh*t takes really careful preparation and so it's not for nothing they refer to diving rebos and mixed gases as "technical diving". What is also true is that for any dive ther eis no EXACT answer as to what is the best possible combination of gas mixes etc. and no two divers will ever come up with the exact same set of numbers, but they will be very close.

My preferred rig is a 7L side to 30 metres then a 12 litre for any deeper with a 5 of 50% - 66% as a deco gas for long deep dives such as the 60 metres we did in training. Having said that I've even dived to 55 metres on air using a twin 12 L scuba and then deco'd at 15/12/6 on surface supplied 75% nitrox in Bikini Atoll in 2006. The problem then was the nitrogen narcosis at 55 metres on air was crippling and rather frightening together with it rendering most of the dive instantly forgotten - narcs produces mild amnesia.

Did you understand all that 'cos I'm coming round with the test papers in a bit!

Really enjoyed that! great photos & report thanks for sharing.

Why the hell didn't they recover her when the sinking happened?

lazyurbexer said:

Why the hell didn't they recover her when the sinking happened?

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I'm not sure. My (sadly ) fading memory tells me that they spent two or three days trying but then gave up because "Windows" will not bow to mere mortals!

It's a fact that when she went down a lot of anything that had much value had already been craned off and obviously no one went down with her. But I believe the engineers tried for days to correct the problem and almost got there but "Windows" would not accept any degree of reality and continued to flood the port side tanks until she rolled.

What is also poignant is that she had actually almost berthed in the harbour despite her serious list to her port side, but the authorties wanted her out of the way just incase the engineers couldn't correct the problem at which point she would "die" there blocking the harbour in the process. So instead of strapping her to a salvage pontoon to take up her rapidly diminshing buoyancy she was moved back out of harms way to continue the process of sinking until she finally rolled and went down where she lies now.

kehumff said:

Nice report, great location, although your comments on other divers seems to sum up whats wrong with the sport.

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I dunno about "what's wrong" per se, it's more about, go do the extra training until you can handle the kit and then the benefits will blow you away within your first few dives.

It's like a lot of things in life. We received extremely negative reactions on the boat because the bubble blowers had to wait until we came out before the dive boat left for port.

More fool them!

We paid the same money for our day out on the wreck but we chose to pay for the extra training beforehand and for better kit, for which we gained almost 250% more time on the wreck at a fraction of the gas cost.

It's a no brainer really!

Thanks for that fantastic report, great pictures. I remember hearing about the wreck years ago and have always fancied a visit (along with Thistlegorm). Didn't a couple of divers die on a visit a while back? I heard rumours that dive visits might be banned due to possible corrosion of the lorry securing chains, was anything mentioned about that?
Thanks also for the rebreather/gas info, I understood most of it! I have never done a Nitrox or rebreather dive and from memory my PADI tables would give me about 7 minutes bottom time at 40 metres on air. A bit too close for a wreck at that depth methinks.

nice

very interesting and very differant great pictures great post thanks.

Mike L said:

Didn't a couple of divers die on a visit a while back?

I have never done a Nitrox or rebreather dive and from memory my PADI tables would give me about 7 minutes bottom time at 40 metres on air.

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You're spot on about air/depth times. Nitrogen absorbtion criipples diving beyond about 25 metres. I used to have the old BSAC tables imprinted in my brain from when I started diving in 1978!!! 500 metres was 7 minutes back then!

Nitrox, and better still, the Advanced Nitrox courses, are the way ahead for diving. BUT if you want half way decent bottom times sadly Closed Circuit Rebreather is the only option right now. It's a lot of money, and a lot of learning time and practise, but bottom times of 250% compared with SCUBA make it a no brainer if you want to do anything more than pretty pretties in shallow water. Having said that the risk is somewhat higher with rebo, though with the proper attention paid to the training you receive and a steady head applied on dives rather than a gungho attitude... well... do I need to say anymore?

As regards deaths on the Zen... I know of one death where a diver on SCUBA decided to go it alone into the engine room and couldn't find his way back out again. He apparently fetched up against a glass window and could see daylight in the corridor beyond. It doesn't bare thinking about frankly. BUT... how often has that happened? I trained a diver in 1979 and I'm sad to say that the stupid sod led a near novice into the engine room of the (upside down) Kron Prinz Willhem battleship in Scapa Flow then lost him in th silt kick. The poor b*gg*r never got out and was only recovered several days later by the Navy. The individual who had led the dive had actually been so apprehensive on his first wreck dive with me that I had to take hold of his arm to calm him even though we were only kneeling on the deck of a relatively benign wreck in Oban called the Breda! But he left our club aftr some time and joined another which had at that time a seriously bad reputation for irresponsibile diving, and within two year this terrible accident had occurred. he never dived again afterwards.

Diving is an unforgiving sport and sadly the reckless idiots it attracts reap the harvest of their irresponsibility far too regularly.

Wow, looks ace

Rather you than me though!

Excellent report!

That's ace!! Quality pics and fantastic reports!! You guys never cease to amaze. Thanks for sharing

TeeJF said:

I'm not sure. My (sadly ) fading memory tells me that they spent two or three days trying but then gave up because "Windows" will not bow to mere mortals! ......

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That seems a real waste... I wonder how much a ship like this costs to build.

Amazing pictures and report by the way though! I especially like the close up of the carpet alongside the picture of the restaurant in use.