🇪🇬 The Blue Hole, Dahab

The hole

A near-circular submarine sinkhole in the fringing reef 10 km north of Dahab, just over 100 m deep. It is separated from the open Gulf of Aqaba by a reef wall, and connected to it in two ways: a shallow saddle at about 6 m that you can swim over, and the Arch — a tunnel through the wall, 26 m long, with its ceiling at 55 m and its seaward mouth opening onto a wall that drops past 1 000 m.

Why it kills people

Estimates of the death toll range from 130 over fifteen years to 200 in total, and it is routinely called the most lethal dive site on Earth. Almost all of it happens at the Arch, and the mechanism is depressingly consistent:

• The tunnel's ceiling is at 55 m, but divers who misjudge the entry find themselves at 70 m or deeper before they find the opening, deep in nitrogen narcosis.
• The Arch looks much shorter than it is. Twenty-six metres of rock overhead is a long way when you are narked and your gas consumption has doubled.
• Current tends to set into the hole, so the swim out is the hard half.
• And it is a shore dive with no gatekeeper. You can walk in off the beach with a single cylinder and no plan.

The best-documented diving death anywhere happened here: Yuri Lipski, a 22-year-old Russian-Israeli instructor, lost buoyancy control on 28 April 2000 and died at 115 m with a helmet camera running. Above the entry point there is a line of memorial plaques cemented to the rock.

The dive

None of that applies to the ordinary dive, which is why the memorials are so jarring. You enter over the saddle, the wall inside the hole is covered in hard and soft coral, and it is a pleasant, easy, beautifully lit circuit — provided you stay above the Arch and treat the blue space below you as scenery.

Dived 8 August 2008 to 26 m, well clear of it. The Arch is 29 m further down.

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Image: Dahab - The blue hole - panoramio.jpg — Francesco Lo Bello, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.