Zenobia (ship)
The Zenobia was a Swedish RoRo ferry that was built in 1979 in the Kockums shipyard in Malmö and delivered to the shipping company AB Nordö. As the flagship of the so-called "Challenger" class, it should serve the ferry traffic between Koper (today's Slovenia) via Volos (Greece) to Tartous (Syria). Her maiden voyage started on May 4, 1980 from Sweden , on May 22, 1980 the Zenobia passed the Strait of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean Sea. On June 2, 1980, the Zenobia was laden with more than 100 trucks on the way to Syria when an increasing list to port was found. Although a team of technicians succeeded in reducing the list, shortly before Larnaca (Cyprus) there was another heel of 40 °.
There is no official explanation for this error. Presumably there was a defect in the automatic ballast tank system, which is actually supposed to compensate for a heeling of the ship by filling the mutual ballast tanks with seawater. It is assumed that this system was programmed incorrectly in the Zenobia and that it filled the ballast tanks on the same side, so that the list continued to increase. When the heavy cargo slipped, the ship could no longer be saved. It was towed out of the port of Larnaca and sank on June 7, 1980 around 2:00 a.m. about 1,500 m from the port at the position 34 ° 53 ′ 21 ″ N , 33 ° 39 ′ 2 ″ E, across the port side. All passengers and crew could be evacuated in time, so that no people were killed.
The Zenobia is now a popular wreck among divers . With its length of 172 m and 23 m width, it is the largest wreck that can be dived in the Mediterranean Sea and is suitable for divers with different levels of training. It is considered to be one of the top ten wrecks in the world because the visibility is usually very good (around 15 m), the water temperatures are mild (in summer around 20 ° C at a depth of 30 m) and the current is usually low. The Zenobia lies on the port side on a sand bank at a depth of 43 m. The starboard side wall can be reached at a depth of around 18 m. Depending on their skills, there is the possibility for advanced divers to penetrate the wreck of the Zenobia. In the past, however, overconfidence resulted in accidents in which divers died.
literature
- Zenobia - Cyprus. In: Unterwasser , Issue 12, Olympia, Nürnberg 2009, p. 82, ISSN 0947-9155 .
- Monty Halls, Miranda Krestovnikoff: Diving, technology, equipment, underwater world, diving areas (original title: Scuba Diving, translated by Michael Kokoscha, editor Julia Niehaus). Dorling Kindersley, Munich 2007, pp. 214-215, ISBN 978-3-8310-1021-9 (= compact & visual ).
Web links
- Zenobia wreck diving on zenobia-wrack.de
- Wreck of the Zenobia on diver-log.de