Diving in Paphos – our first dive in 10 years and our first ever in the Mediterranean. What better way to celebrate my birthday? Except what I imagined would be a graceful glide through shoals of multicoloured fish turned into something straight out of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory – minus the helpful Oompa Loompas.

10 years ago, Matt and I found ourselves on a tiny island between Bali and Lombok in Indonesia. The island was called Gili Trawangan and it was surrounded by coral reefs teaming with marine life. The Eden of the sea. We stayed for a month and learned to dive.

Diving opened up the world beneath the waves. We swam with turtles, sharks, rays, moray eels, octopus and fish with amazing names like unicorn fish and trigger fish. We got our PADI Open Water qualification, followed quickly by night dives, Nitrox dives, deep sea dives and the Advanced PADI.

‘I wish we lived in a hot country with warm seas,’ I said to Matt on our last day in Gili Trawangan. ‘I’d be diving every week.’

Fast forward ten years and by amazing good fortune we were living in a hot country with warm seas. But in four years, neither of us had even gone near a dive centre. There were always childcare issues and so many other things to discover in our island home.

But not diving niggled for one big reason – the Zenobia. A sunken ferry off the coast of Larnaca, it’s one of the best dive sites in the world. It sort of feels rude not to dive it when it’s on your door step.

‘What do you want to do for your birthday?’ Matt asked a couple of weeks ago.

‘Let’s go diving!’

The thought had come out of nowhere. We’d do a refresher dive now, then tackle the Zenobia later in the year. Matt’s parents were visiting and offered to look after Herc and Goobie.

Sorted.

We booked two refresher dives with Kembali Diving for €80 per person. ‘Kembali’ means ‘welcome’ in Balinese. It seemed a happy coincidence.

Kembali Diving is run by Chris from Pissouri, a retired RAF officer. He teaches people from all walks of life to dive, including students from Eton College in the U.K. (where Prince William went to school) and people on the British military bases – he has a centre in RAF Akrotiri.

Chris collected us from our home at 8am and took us to two bays in Peyia, north of Paphos.

We climbed into wetsuits and Chris refreshed us on our diving equipment and safety checks. I’d forgotten everything.

Though I’d forgotten much more than I thought I’d forgotten. As I was about to find out.

For those unfamiliar with diving, the crucial things you need are a wetsuit, fins, mask, air tank, diving watch/compass and a BCD. I wish I could remember what BCD stands for but I’m sure the B stands for bugger, given what was about to happen. The BCD is like an inflatable vest. Attached to it is your air tank and regulators (the thing you breathe through), plus a tube with buttons to inflate and deflate the vest.

I’d totally forgotten about the BCD and its inflatable powers.

We climbed down the rocks and into the water. You inflate the BCD before you get in the water and then press the deflate button when you are ready to sink beneath the surface. We were in two metres of water and so I sunk beneath the waves without any trouble and swam after Chris, blissfully ignorant of my ignorance.

I kicked hard as we gradually swam deeper, past a natural rock formation called the amphitheatre and around massive boulders covered with sea grass.

The biggest impression this underwater world made on me was its sheer lack of fish. The odd tiny shoal here, a solitary parrot fish there. One red star fish. It was unnerving. I’d read a lot in the news about the climate emergency, the sixth extinction, the statistics about the decline of species across the globe. And to me, what I saw on this dive was an example of exactly that.

I’d been told numerous times about overfishing in Cypriot waters. The running joke ‘Oh you won’t find fish in the sea here. They’ve all been eaten.’ Except it isn’t a joke. Even the young fish, too small to eat, aren’t returned to the sea after they are caught, aren’t given the opportunity to reproduce. It’s a tragedy.

I was so distracted by trying to spot a fish that I kept losing my balance, rolling onto my back, kicking desperately to turn the right way up. It was knackering.

And then I had a very painful reminder of one of the most basic things you should do when you dive. Equalise your ears. As you swim deeper the pressure changes and if you don’t equalise your ears (like you would on a plane) it soon begins to hurt. A lot.

I only remembered to do this when my ears started hurting. Far, far too late. I started to panic, a horrendous feeling when you are underwater, working hard to breath in air. I kicked and kicked to try to get to the surface but I wasn’t getting anywhere. I’d forgotten to inflate the BCD. Chris came to the rescue and inflated it for me and we both rose to the surface.

On the surface, Chris patiently reminded me that I shouldn’t be kicking underwater and using up all my energy. I needed to use the BCD to control ascent and decent, pressing each button the tiniest amount to inflate or deflate.

And it was at that point that both dives turned into something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Remember the scene when Charlie and Grandpa try some Fizzy Lifting Drink? The drink sends them soaring into the air. And just before they are about to be diced up by a massive ceiling fan, they burp and start to sink.

Well, that was me and Matt during our first two dives in Cyprus. Soaring and burping across the Mediterranean. Inflate the BCD and we lifted up through the water. When we went too high, we pressed a button on our BCD to make it burp out air and deflate. Of course in an ideal world you wouldn’t rely on your BCD for buoyancy – you’d use your lungs.

It sounds like we got the hang of it, doesn’t it? Ha! Achieving neutral buoyancy (being able to simply hover in the water) is a skill that takes practice. We wouldn’t overcome our buoyancy crapness in one dive.

It was a skill we no longer possessed. Press the BCD button to rise over a rock and before I knew it I was soaring up to the surface. Try to descend and I’d come down too quickly. Playing havoc with my ears.

I looked down and there was Matt, rolling around on the sea bed like an old shoe. He appeared to be having the opposite problem.

It would have been funny if we’d been watching someone else.

My true nemesis came in the form of the ‘swim through’, a hole in the rock face that you could swim through. It sounded so simple. But you reach it by dropping into a basin-like rock feature and the swim-through looked like a very dark and very intimidating abyss. It was bad enough at the Küçük Erenkoy Tunnel. This was underwater.

I shook my head at Matt to say ‘There’s no bloody way I’m going in there!!!’ Feeling panicky, I turned my back on the gaping mouth of the swim-through and tried to inflate the BCD to rise higher.

I just sank.

I was stuck on the sea bed at the bottom of the basin, a malevolent abyss behind me. And I kept pressing the BCD button but nothing happened. I could feel myself getting short of breath, beginning to panic. I closed my eyes and pretended I was in labour, slowing down my breathing to inhale Gas and Air. Chris reached me and I held onto his arm, eyes tightly closed until we reached the surface.

‘You were pressing the deflate button,’ he said. ‘That’s why you couldn’t get off the seabed.’

Bugger.

Matt popped up a minute later.

‘The swim through is only a couple of metres long. If you’d swam closer you’d have seen the daylight on the other side.

Arse.

As I got my shit together, my Nikon Coolpix AW130 underwater camera lost its shit entirely and died. I bought it especially for diving because it claimed you could take it up to 30m underwater – perfect for the Zenobia. It flooded with water just 10m down – and I’d taken meticulous care of it. If you take away anything from this post (aside from how NOT to dive), don’t buy this Nikon model for diving. It’s been good for swimming pools and snorkelling but that’s it.

We weren’t able to take any photos of our second dive.

Our first dive was a pretty brutal refresher, showing us how much our brains have decayed in our child-rearing years. And even Chris admitted we’d forgotten a lot more than he’d imagined for Advanced PADI divers. Mortifying. But he was so encouraging that we haven’t been put off.

We redeemed ourselves in the second dive. Yes we were still burping up and down through the sea, ears in agony, but things were more controlled. We were experimenting with buoyancy this time, no panicking, no pressing the wrong button. There were no fish either. Well very few. But there were some incredible rock formations, like the massive ‘Witches’ Cauldron’. Impressive. Shame there’s no photo.

I enjoyed the second dive. And it taught me that I can pick up my old diving skills again, with practice. I’m not ready for the Zenobia. I need to defeat that swim-through first. But before that, I’m going to book onto one of Chris’s buoyancy sessions and have some fun burping around in the BCD.

Our first dives in Cyprus were surprising in lots of ways and didn’t go at all as I’d imagined. And yet I felt wonderfully empowered by doing them. I may spend most of my days with baby snot on my shoulder, unbrushed hair and bags under my eyes, but I can still crawl into a wet suit and make an utter tit of myself underwater. Does that make me intrepid? I’ll keep telling myself it does.

A tit – but an intrepid one.