Dive sites excellent for business

FOR MANY years my wife and I visited Paphos on holiday and, while on these holidays, I managed to qualify with PADI at Cydive in Paphos to Scuba dive safely for pleasure and relaxation.

When I was able to retire I looked forward to more diving and it appeared that there was going to be an upsurge in diving in Cyprus as, in an effort to expand the tourist diving facilities in Paphos, Limassol and Ayia Napa, extra wrecks were to be sunk to encourage fish life to return as the areas have been severely overfished for many years.

There was a great deal of excitement in the Paphos diving community when the allotted wreck was sunk and marked a few weeks ago and I took great pleasure to be on the first Cydive organised dive on the site.

Imagine our chagrin when arriving at the dive site we found that the buoy tethered to the wreck to aid location had been cut loose by, we can only assume, members of the short-sighted Paphos ‘commercial’ fishing ‘mafia’.

Through the immense skill of our boat captain and a handy GPS reader we managed to find the wreck and the dive was enjoyed by all, but it took 40 minutes of maneuvering in a bobbing dive boat to successfully locate it.

Can I, through your pages, try to convince them that tourist diving is a vast benefit to all businesses in the area of a prime dive site.

You only have to ask the business population of Larnaca what benefit the wreck of the Zenobia has brought.

Michael F Roberts, Peyia

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