Diving the Wreck of the Zenobia - Introduction

by B. N. Sullivan

Recently I posted a photo of our friend Joe taking a picture of Jerry on a shipwreck. That was a hint to our readers that we were preparing to tell another wreck diving story on The Right Blue -- something we haven't done in quite awhile.

We had been poring over our old logbooks, and sifting through our photos, looking for good stories to present to our readers. We came across a cache of photos from a certain trip to Cyprus, and we found the logbook entries and notes that went with the photos. We knew we had the story we wanted to tell next -- the story of our dives on the Zenobia, the largest shipwreck we've ever visited underwater.

The Zenobia was a modern Swedish ship, built in 1979. She was a huge vessel, more than 172 meters (560 feet) in length, with a beam of about 23 meters (75 feet). She sank in Larnaca Bay, Cyprus, on June 7, 1980.

The sinking of the Zenobia took hours, and this afforded time for the rescue of her crew. No one was killed when the Zenobia went under, but she did take all of her cargo with her. The cargo, it turns out, is almost as interesting to divers as the wreck itself.

The Zenobia was a "ro-ro" ferry -- "ro-ro" as in roll-on, roll-off. What rolled on and rolled off were large commercial vehicles. The Zenobia's mission was to transport them between various ports, so that they didn't have to be driven extremely long distances overland. When she went down, the Zenobia was laden with more than 100 articulated lorries -- that is, trucks with two trailers behind a single cab. Each of those was full of goods.

We got to explore the Zenobia in September of 1992, when we made seven dives on the wreck. In the next several posts we will recount this week-long adventure in Cyprus. I took photos on six of our seven dives on the Zenobia, so you will be able to see some of what we saw of the ship and her cargo, as well. We hope our readers will enjoy following along as we tell this tale.

WW #27 - Two-bar Anemonefish from the Red Sea

[Click photo for larger view.]

My previous Wordless Wednesday posts.

Wordless Wednesday home page.

Announcing a New Photo Blog

Many readers of The Right Blue tell us that they visit because they like Bobbie's underwater photos. Now The Right Blue has a companion photo blog that displays photos that Bobbie takes on land. The new photo blog displays garden, nature and travel photography.

The new blog is a month old today, but we decided to wait until we were finished tweaking the layout before we announced it. The site's name is straightforward: B N Sullivan - Photography. The URL is easy to remember, too: BNSullivanPhoto.com.

We invite you to go and have a look, and tell us what you think. Use the link above, or just click on the screenshot at the top of this page, and it will take you right there. (And don't worry. Our stories and underwater photos on The Right Blue will continue as well.)

Meme: Link 5 (with a 'Right Blue' twist)

My friend Cathy, whose blog Keeping it Real at 66 Degrees North Latitude is about her life in Kotzebue, Alaska, has tagged me for a meme called Link 5. Except for weekly participation in Wordless Wednesday, I've never before done any kind of meme on The Right Blue, but I have agreed to do this one. According to Cathy, here is what the Link 5 meme is all about.

The rules for this meme are as follows: Go through your archives and link to five of your favorite posts that pertain to the following categories:

1. family
2. friends
3. yourself
4. something you love
5. anything you choose

Then pass it along to five other bloggers, two of whom should be people you know but could stand to learn something about, and the others can be new friends.

I'm going to cheat a little. I'll do the first part now, i.e., the five links to pages on this blog. But instead of tagging five unsuspecting people, I think I will ask around first to see who among my blogger friends would be willing to participate. I just don't feel right about springing this on someone by surprise, much less five someones!

I will add updates to the bottom of this post as I identify five good sports who are willing to play along with the meme.

Here are my five links -- previous posts from The Right Blue that fit into those categories -- but I've decided to put my own twist on this. Since The Right Blue is built around photos -- some stand-alone photos, and some photos that have stories -- I will think of those five categories in terms of photos.

1) Photo of Family: Regular readers of The Right Blue know that my favorite underwater model is my husband, Jerry. One of my favorite pictures of him in that role is this one: Jerry is posing with a comb jelly.

2) Photo of Friends: This one is very easy, since I've recently been reminiscing about old friends here on The Right Blue. Here is a post that is a photo essay about what some of those friends did on Easter Weekend, 1974.

3) Photo of Myself: The are not too many photos of me on The Right Blue, because I'm usually the photographer. Here's one, though -- and naturally, it is a picture of me stalking a stingray and a bar jack -- so that I can take their picture!

4) Photo of Something I Love: This one was tough to choose, because so many of the photos and stories on The Right Blue are about things I love. Out of many possibilities, I chose a photo that exemplifies something I love about underwater macro photography. This picture shows a tiny little fish peeking out from under the edge of a mushroom-shaped coral where it was hiding. I never saw that little fish until the photo was enlarged!

5) Free Choice Photo: That would be the photo on this page, a previously unpublished photo taken on the same day, and at the same place, as the photo that is in the header of The Right Blue. The fish are Bigeye Trevally (also known as Bigeye Jacks). Back in November I wrote about these schooling, swirling fish in an article called You don't know jacks... (starring Jerry, of course).

There. That wasn't so difficult. Now, to find five bloggers willing to play Link 5...