The cinema astute among you will notice a film crossover reference in the title, but today’s post has nothing to do with young people marooned on a desert island and a strange creature from a 1950s B movie. It has to do with water, which seems to be the trend for this week’s posts. I was going to write about water bottles, but that will have to wait until tomorrow, as there is something far more exciting to talk about, and that’s yesterday when we took our godson for a dive. At least, Neil and the staff at Blue Lagoon Divers took him for a dive. His mother and I stayed on dry land, and it was the closest I had been to the sea so far this year, and my first time on a beach since sometime last summer.
But this isn’t about me. It’s about divers and the dive centre you can find in the town square in Yialos. The business is run by fully qualified and highly experienced divers headed by Vasilis (Will) Zouroudi, whose parents will be known to many regular Symi visitors. They offer all kinds of dives, from first-time ‘tasters’ to deep dives for experienced and PADI certified members. Yesterday, while one staff diver was taking H on his dive, another was out acting as a guide for qualified divers visiting the underwater Nimos ‘cave’, one of the local shipwrecks and other underwater places, and another team member was taking a client through her Open Water course.
My interest lay in watching H on what was his second dive (he’d been two years ago for his 14th birthday present, but now older, he was able to dive deeper). It was an early start for the poor chap. He only finished work at the restaurant at three that morning, before I hauled him from his bed at eight, shoved some breakfast into him, and the three of us walked down to the dive centre to be kitted out.
That done, it was a van ride around to Giala, the bay on the way to Nimborio, where I could sit at the kantina with a frappe as Neil and H transformed into characters from a James Bond film. That was after the full safety briefing from the instructor which I was party to, and very well explained it all was too. H had already done the online course and been through the pre-dive study materials. Safety is the watchword, though I have learnt several other diving terms over the past couple of years, and a few of the rules. (Never hold your breath, don’t touch anything under the water, etc.) That done and thoroughly understood, off they went to practise skills in the shallows before disappearing below water for half an hour.
As you can see from today’s photos, both were overjoyed with the experience and returned from their adventure exhilarated and ready to do more of the same. You can do it too if you like. You can contact the dive centre through their website (linked in this post), and if you want to do, say, the Open Water course, take on the study materials first, before you come to Symi, because it’s initially all done online. That would prepare you for when you’re here, booked in and ready to go. The centre has the equipment, so you don’t need to bring your own. (They can also supply a photographer, subject to availability.)
It’s an excellent addition to the activities already available on Symi, though Blue Lagoon doesn’t stop there. They also volunteer at other times of the year and help retrieve underwater rubbish from the sea around Symi’s coast.
If you are interested, you can make all enquiries through the website, or by calling into the centre, which is open from early in the morning until noon (if they’re not all out diving, but it’s always open around 8.30 to 9.00) and again at five in the evening onwards.
