In early May 2009 I completed my PADI OWD certificate durin my vacation in Greece on the island Zakynthos. The island has several IDCs, but most of the are run by local divers and appear to be less serious in following the PADI rules for diving, i.e. taking care of the marine environment.

Luckily I found Eurodivers (www.eurodivers.nu), which is run by several Swedes and with a hand full of instructors and interns from around the world, e.g. USA and France.

During my 2x2 OW dives I had Ryan Szarvas-Kidd as my instructor and it was great. He's a really talented instructor and great underwater instructor.
He took me and my girlfriend to several great dive sites around Marathonisi (turtle island), Marathia and Cameo Island and we were mostly around 12 meters of water.

On the dives we saw large schools of fish of Ornate wrasse, Mediterranean rainbow wrasse, Symphodus ocellatus, Painted comber, Saddled seabream, White seabream, nnular seabream, peacock worms, grouper, fire worms as well as some nudibranch and octopus. Unfortunately we didn't encounter any turtles nor barracudas but they should be there later in the season.
See the fish species here: http://www.explorecrete.com/nature/fish-1.html

All in all a great place for diving - Zakynthos definitely has high recommendations from me...

Images from the dive sites

Next steps:

• Over the next couple of months I'l be doing several dives in the local area in Aarhus, Denmark.
• Continuing to PADI AWOD later this year Images from my trip:

Images from our trip