Blue Hole, Dahab

The dive

The Blue Hole is a near-circular submarine sinkhole in the fringing reef a few kilometres north of Dahab, on the Gulf of Aqaba coast of Sinai. It is about 100 m deep inside, open to the sea through a shallow sill - the saddle - at roughly 6 m, and connected to the open sea a second time by the Arch, a 26 m tunnel whose ceiling Wikipedia places at 55 m and whose seaward floor is at about 120 m. Outside the reef the bottom falls past 1,000 m. You walk in from the shore; there is no boat and no jetty.

This record sits 170 m from our own row for The Bells, which is the northern entry point used for the traverse into the hole, and the two are effectively the same site described from different ends. Read them together. What this page adds is the hole itself, and the honest version of it is that the ordinary Blue Hole dive is benign. Divers drop into the basin, potter round the inside wall, cross the saddle at about 6 m and come back - or arrive over the saddle at the end of the Bells drift. Snorkellers swim the same sill, and freedivers use the basin as a training venue because it is sheltered, deep and a few steps from the road. None of that is a hard dive.

The danger here is entirely about the Arch and about depth. The Arch is below recreational limits on air by any standard, it is a genuine overhead environment, and a diver who misses it on the way through, or who narcs and keeps descending, has no bottom to stop on. Nobody knows the real death toll and the published figures are estimates, not facts: Wikipedia records an estimate attributed to local recovery diver Tarek Omar of more than 130 divers in the fifteen years to 2012 - more than eight a year - and an alternative claim of as many as 200 for the same period, with some counts including surface snorkelling deaths. The Egyptian authorities publish nothing. We do not assert any unattributed figure. What is not disputed is on the shore: a wall of memorial plaques left by families on the path down to the water, the instructor Yuri Lipski who died on 28 April 2000 at 115 m in an uncontrolled descent his own camera recorded, and the freediving safety diver Stephen Keenan, who died here in July 2017 covering an Arch attempt by Alessia Zecchini - the first recorded death of a safety diver in freediving.

The occurrence records we hold for this position are ordinary Gulf of Aqaba coastal reef fauna and match the neighbouring sites almost exactly: scalefin anthias, Klunzinger's wrasse, purple tang, sergeant majors, sulphur damsels, twoband anemonefish, bullethead parrotfish, giant clams, diagonal and exquisite butterflyfish, Red Sea bannerfish, regal angelfish, common lionfish and coral hind. The saddle itself carries a shallow hard-coral garden.

• A roughly 100 m deep sinkhole in the reef, entered from the shore
• The saddle at about 6 m is the shallow sill most divers and all snorkellers actually swim
• The Arch at about 55 m ceiling, 26 m long, is a technical dive and is where the deaths happen
• Memorial plaques on the shore path; the fatality record is real, disputed in size and officially unpublished
• A major freediving training venue as well as a scuba site

Conditions

A sheltered basin with light current inside; the wall outside can carry more. Shore entry over the reef edge, no swell to speak of in normal conditions. The saddle at about 6 m is the shallow crossing between the hole and the open sea and is where safety stops and snorkellers end up.

On current: The hole is about 100 m deep and the saddle sits at roughly 6 m (Wikipedia). One Dahab centre publishes 18-60 m for the site as a whole and requires AOW+, with technical certification for the Arch; we record 6-30 m because that is the recreational band and a 60 m air dive on this wall is the exact profile that kills people here. Current inside the basin is rated two out of five by that centre and is generally light - it is a sheltered bowl - while the outside wall on the Bells drift can pick up. We found no sourced visibility figure specific to the Blue Hole, so it is left blank.

Dives & underwater footage