BSAC TRAVEL CLUB - Trip Reports

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A Mix of A Mix Course - A Tri Mix Course, Dive Tek,Cyprus - March 2006

by Alan Ewart

In August 2005 I took the family out to Cyprus for a holiday and did a bit of diving with Dive Tek Cyprus. I had very good service from Dive Tek and in discussions with the owner had been told that Cyprus was a great place to do Technical training up to and including Advanced Trimix. I was aware that Dive Tek had provided logistical support for UK instructors who had flown groups of students out to Cyprus to do advanced wreck courses on the Zenobia, these trips had been well received. A few weeks later I had a trip to Malin head on MV Salutay and suggested to skipper Al Wright that I would like to do a gas course with him and suggested Cyprus would be a good location for a spring training course. Al liked the idea so I introduced Al and the owner of Dive Tek to each other at the Birmingham dive show. After some discussions to ensure that all the logistics were in place a date was set and on the evening of 9th March 2006 I was on my way to Heathrow to meet up with Al who was flying in from Belfast.

Al & I flew BA to Larnaca; I was a bit worried about our weight allowances, 23Kg in the hold and a further 6Kg hand luggage. I'd read a few horror stories about people getting hit for excess baggage on BA, but we sailed through without an eyelid being batted. I had about 28Kg in my hold baggage and a further 15kg of hand luggage. Al checked in 35Kg and had another 20Kg of hand luggage. We didn't get charged a penny either way. Just lucky I guess. The flight to Larnaca passed without incident and as promised we were met at the airport. We had a coffee and a chat whilst we waited for the other members of our party, Bert and Terry to arrive an hour or so later. They had flown in from Birmingham on Helios. Well you could have blown me down with a feather I thought these two were carrying the hold luggage for the entire aircraft. They had over 70 Kilos each!! Apparently Helios allows 'unlimited' dive kit for just Ł30 for the return trip.

So after various introductions we were off to Paralimni and our accommodation. I have to say the centre came up trumps here. We had two apartments, each with kitchen, lounge, bathroom and two bedrooms, the cost just a miserly Ł9 a night each. A real bargain, it was just a shame about the bar across the road that played very loud and very bad karaoke until between 3 & 4 am of Friday, Saturday and Sunday night.

On Saturday morning we were collected at 9am, somewhat bleary eyed and taken to the dive centre for our first dive. Unfortunately this is where things started to go downhill with the first of a series of problems that frankly ruined the week. On arrival we were informed, that the centre had no helium and only about 80 bar of o2 in a single J, a terrific start to a Trimix course! Not to be deterred we combined sorting our kit with a 'lecture on the fly' about kit configuration. Al was very thorough and I picked up lots of tips about kit storage, hose routing etc. This process complete we headed off to 'Cyclops' a shore dive location 10 minutes drive away for a shakedown dive and some drills. It was somewhat bizarre diving on manifolded twins and two stage cylinders, all of which contained air. Terry who was diving on a classic inspiration was very concerned that he only had 70 bar of o2. I quickly regretted not taking my own wing and back-plate with me. I found the borrowed Buddy tek-wing difficult to get used to, especially carrying two stages. That said, my trim was OK and buoyancy not too bad, but I was less than stable when doing my shutdown drills. It didn't help that I managed to break the clip on my torch getting into the water so was unable to clip off the umbilical; I also found the 'Beaver' manifold valves very stiff. I asked for the valves to be lubricated that evening, but I'm afraid this didn't happen, either that night or indeed any other night.

Sunday's diving was again at Cyclops and again on air with twins and 2 stages. I had sorted out my kit from the previous days diving and felt a lot more comfortable. We spent the next 75 mins or so running through all the relevant safety drills, shut downs, OOA swims, stage removal, recovery and re-clipping, gas sharing etc. Al kept a close eye on everything and hit us with post failures etc on a regular basis. By the end of the day everything was running very slickly indeed. I quickly gained confidence in both Bert & Terry who demonstrated a very high degree of diving skills throughout the course. This site was very good for these types of drills as there are large natural platforms at 6M and 20M.

Sunday afternoon was spent doing lectures and listening to the wind which was steadily picking up outside, a worry really as we were planning to dive the Zenobia the next day. The owner of Dive tek came to find us in the afternoon to let us know that the main charter boat to the Zenobia was not running, but that he had managed to find us a boat with a company called Viking Divers in Larnaca.

Monday dawned overcast and windy, but we headed to Larnaca in hope. Dive Tek had managed to squeeze a 28% mix into our twins and a 50% deco mix. Our second stages still contained air, not ideal, but useable. On arrival in Larnaca, we were concerned to see the spray flying over the harbour wall and white horses on the waves. The skipper was happy to run us out so we decided to go for it. I must be honest it was rough! The boat was a small fishing boat, no benches, no kitting up stations and it rolled like ball bearings on the kitchen table. Getting kitted up was a nightmare and I couldn't wait to get off the boat, so much so that as soon as I was kitted I told the others I would see them at 6m for a bubble check and off I went.

Once I got onto the line things settled and I was able to relax and look down on the wreck in all her magnificence. I hung there for a few minutes by myself and just took in the awesome sight lying just 12M below me. It's hard to describe, if you have not dived her, this is one huge wreck and so intact for such a shallow wreck. Al had told us that this one was an exploratory dive and being the only one in the party who had dived her before I was tour guide. We dropped down off the side towards the stern doors and as we rounded the doors I became aware that there were only two of us. In my excitement I had gone off like an exorcet missile totally forgetting that Terry was on a rebreather and wanted to take pictures.

We waited around the stern for Al and Terry to catch up and then made our way to the bottom and the props, each blade of which is considerably bigger than me. We made our way back to the open lorry deck looking up at 40 ton lorries still hanging on their chains is bizarre. We entered the main lorry deck and made our way along its length ascending slowly towards the small door that was our route back into the open water. A swim around the bows, back along past the bridge and slowly on to the mid-ships deco station finished our dive, with a max depth of 42m even an hours bottom time gave us a very reasonable amount of deco to clear. I was to be very glad of this, because by the time I got to my 6m stop it was very uncomfortable on the bar with a lot of swell and surge. I was feeling a bit rough by the time I got back on the boat via the worst ladder I've ever had the misfortune to climb. Much to my shame I even managed to throw up whilst waiting for everyone else to get back onboard. Me an ex-sailor too, the first time I've been seasick in 20 years. Still, I soon cheered up when I saw a nice big 'J' of o2 in the back of the truck when we were picked up.

Tuesday was another day on the Zenobia in broadly similar conditions though on this occasion we did some penetration, ran some lines, did some drills and did considerable work on our team procedures. By the end of this dive I felt that we were working well as a group and it was coming together very well. All except for that damn ladder, which fell off and landed on my head as I was trying to pass up my stages. When we were picked up after the dive we were very pleased to see a 'J' of helium and another of o2 in the truck. The afternoon saw us planning for a 70m boat dive, working out optimum mixes, run times, deep stops etc. We were good to go!

Well, we were that is until The owner of Dive Tek came to the accommodation to tell us there was no boat for the next day's mixed gas dive. To be honest I was so angry I could barely speak. We had made the arrangements for this trip in January, and the afternoon before the week's biggest dive we find out that Dive Tek were running around trying and failing to find us a boat. I just can't believe this was not organised months before.

Thankfully Wednesday dawned bright and calm, as we had no option but to do our Trimix dives from the shore! Now don't get me wrong, If we had a site where we could drop off a wall and get 70 - 75m then no problem, but at Cyclops you have a 15 minute swim before reaching a gentle slope (maybe 30 degrees) which drops off to depth. We were 20 minutes into the dive before we could get our max depth and even then we didn't reach 70m. We had to do our ascent back up the slope, as we were too far off shore to go up a line with no boat cover! Worse still, the bottom of the slope is a sandy bed, and like all the diving in this part of Cyprus is totally devoid of life.

Frankly this dive had to rank as the biggest waste of £75 worth of helium ever! This course is supposed to be about diving with a purpose, this was anything but. So poor in fact that we decided to put an air top on our (17/40) mix for the next day and to spend out final dive doing in water skills. We even (jokingly) discussed doing the dive on air in the hope that we would see mermaids and underwater elephants and that the narcosis would make the dive worthwhile. The reality is that the site was so unsuitable for running proper ascent procedures that Al didn't believe he could teach us anything and he was so determined to ensure that we had a quality course that he had to give us even more of his time on the return home to finish the course here in the UK.

In conclusion Al Wright is a really top class instructor. He has a relaxed and very easy-going style, but is very thorough and has a wealth of experience to pass on. His knowledge is excellent and he puts it over well both in lectures, in demonstrations and in water. On the other hand I was really disappointed with the service we received from Dive-tek Cyprus. It was obvious that little preparation had been done for our visit, especially when they had 3 months notice of when we would be arriving and had been told exactly what our requirements were. The fact that we had no o2 or helium on arrival, no boat had been arranged and that no booster pump meant a maximum 100 bar fill in our 80% deco mix. Even our 40% mix was only about 140 bar. Our rebreather diver didn't get more than an 80 bar o2 fill all week. This in my view is unacceptable, a free-flow or other problem on one of the team's deco gas may have left us all vulnerable. Dive-tek need to remember that another hour's flying time could have had us in Sharm, with deep walls, wrecks and wildlife in abundance. I was upset that we didn't even get an apology for failure to deliver what had been promised, and to add insult to injury, we were even charged a daily rate to rent a couple of kilos of lead………….

The area around Protarus offers OK holiday diving to about 20m. My view after this experience is that it is completely unsuitable for advanced technical courses. I am told that there are some unexplored marks at around the 70m mark, and if we had access to a boat to allow us to dive them then I may have been telling a different story. The fact that we were the centre's first course of the year obviously added to our poor experience. The Zenobia is a great site for a wreck course or a technical Nitrox course, but for more advanced training I'm afraid my advice would be to go elsewhere.

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