Sunken wine bottles to be retrieved from seabed

280 Bottles of Local Cyprus Wine was sunk to the bottom of the sea near paphos in 2015. These bottles will be lifted from the seabed on Sunday 7th May 2017 as part of the #Pafos2017 City of Culture celebrations.

The bottles were placed in a box and sunk in November 2015.
“The bottles will be opened by a Sommelier to see if they are drinkable and if they are, the public will get a chance to try them,” a spokesman for Pafos2017 told the Cyprus Mail.

She pointed out that even if the wine is spoiled, there will be other local wine available to try at the event which will be held at Paphos harbour from 11am on Sunday.
“This is a spectacular and special event and the hoisting of the wines will be followed by tasting 280 similar bottles that have been stored in optimum winery conditions.”

Members of the public will also be given the opportunity to board the Jolly Roger II and participate in the trip to Geroskipou to retrieve the wines and witness the entire wine lifting process first hand. The boat will then sail back to Paphos harbour, she said.

“There is space for around one hundred people on the boat, so people should arrive at the harbour early if they wish to be on board.”

The project is part of the culture capitals gastronomy programme the “Art of wine – The garden of tastes”,
Twenty five Cyprus wineries are involved in the project and provided wine for the project, including:
KEO, Vassilikon, Zambartas, Tsaggarides, Kolios, Ezousa, Kamantarena and Shoufas.

The cultural capital project is a collaboration of the Sommeliers Association, the Dive Centre Association and Cypriot Wine Producers.

Wine event- Paphos harbour, Kato Paphos, Sunday May 7th, 11am – 12 noon.

© Cyprus Mail Ltd. 2017

Saving Cyprus Turtles from Fishermen’s Nets

A pilot project is underway to protect turtles from being caught in fishermen’s nets, programme coordinator of the project for Cyprus Yianna Samuel said on Tuesday.

As part of a European initiative, ‘Life Euroturtles’, this summer a number of lights will be attached to net fisheries in the Latchi and Pyrgos area.

In 2016 a team of scientists at the University of Exeter discovered that attaching green Led lights to nets used by small-scale fishermen can reduce the number of green turtle deaths by 64 per cent as they avoid them.

The result, if it works as planned, will be a win-win situation.

“The turtles which are a bycatch will be saved, and the fisherman will have less damage to their nets, and the turtles will not eat the fish in the nets,” Samuel explained. “Turtles need to come up for air, so when they get entangled they usually die. And the fishermen won’t have to spend time trying to disentangle them and repair the nets.”

The cost of the project is not very high, as each lamp costs just €10 to €15 and for now, not a lot of them are needed. The lights used are small enough not to scare off sea life from whole areas, they can only see them close up.

The project is funded by the European Commission together with the fishery department of the government and the University of Cyprus’ oceanography centre as co-funding partners.

It includes six EU countries, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta and Slovenia.

The focus is on areas that are pivotal for the conservation of the two sea turtle species occurring in the EU and listed as priority species the Habitats Directive, the loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) and the green turtle (Chelonia mydas). In the EU, the loggerhead turtle has major nesting sites in Greece and Cyprus, and limited nesting in Italy. Most turtles from these sites remain in the eastern Mediterranean. In the EU, the green turtle only breeds in Cyprus, and its foraging grounds in EU waters are in Cyprus and Greece.

The activities of the Life Euroturtles project prioritise areas where conservation measures are considered important and urgent, and could make a difference for the sea turtle status at EU, national and local levels.