The Bells

The dive

The Bells is a narrow chimney cut into the reef wall a short walk north of the Blue Hole, on the coast a few kilometres north of Dahab. You giant-stride in from the shore, drop through the crack, and exit at roughly 27-28 m onto an open wall that falls away into hundreds of metres of water. From there the standard dive is a drift south along the wall, past overhangs with black coral, to the saddle - a shallow coral sill at about 6-7 m - and then over it into the Blue Hole itself for the safety stop and exit. Done that way it is a normal advanced recreational dive, and dive centres rate it as such.

It is also the entry to the site with the worst fatality record in recreational diving, and that has to be stated in full rather than in a footnote. The Arch is a tunnel through the reef, 26 m long, whose ceiling Wikipedia places at 55 m and dive centres describe at 52-56 m, connecting the Blue Hole to the open sea. It is below recreational depth on air by any standard, it is a genuine overhead environment, and the hole itself bottoms out at just over 100 m with the seaward floor dropping past 1,000 m. Divers who miss the Arch on the way through, or who narc at depth and continue down, do not have a bottom to stop on.

Nobody knows the real death toll and the published figures should be treated as estimates, not facts. Wikipedia records an estimate attributed to local recovery diver Tarek Omar in 2012 of more than 130 divers in the preceding fifteen years, notes an alternative claim of as many as 200 for the same period, and says the counts include some surface snorkelling deaths. The Egyptian authorities do not publish figures. What is not in dispute is on the shore: a wall of memorial plaques left by families on the path to the site, and named cases including the instructor Yuri Lipski, who died on 28 April 2000 at 115 m in an uncontrolled descent that his own camera recorded, and the freediving safety diver Stephen Keenan, who died in the hole in July 2017 during a rescue.

None of that describes the Bells-to-Blue-Hole traverse, which thousands of people dive safely every year, and one Dahab centre puts it bluntly that this is not an inherently dangerous site when the training is respected. It describes what happens when divers go down the middle instead of along the wall. The occurrence records we hold here are unremarkable Gulf of Aqaba reef life - scalefin anthias, Klunzinger's wrasse, purple tang, sergeant majors, twoband anemonefish, giant clams, blackback butterflyfish - and the wall sometimes produces trevally, a turtle, or a passing shark.

• Shore entry through a chimney in the reef, exiting at about 27-28 m on an open wall
• Drift south along the wall to the 6-7 m saddle and into the Blue Hole to exit
• The Arch at roughly 52-56 m is a technical dive, not part of this route
• Memorial plaques on the shore path; the site's fatality record is real and disputed in size

Conditions

A shore giant stride, a short drop through the chimney to about 27-28 m, then a gentle drift south along a vertical wall to the saddle at 6-7 m and over into the Blue Hole. Dahab centres rate the current here light to moderate. Surface conditions on the shore platform matter more than anything in the water.

On current: Sources disagree on the recreational maximum and we take the conservative reading. The chimney exit is given at 27 m by one Dahab centre and as a swim-through at about 28 m by another; the standard drift then shallows steadily to the 6-7 m saddle. One operator advertises a 60 m maximum for AOW-plus divers and another says Deep Diver certification allows 40 m for a look at the Arch; we record 6-30 m as the recreational band because a 60 m air dive on this wall is exactly the profile that has killed people here. Current on the wall is rated light to moderate by the centres. We found no sourced visibility figure for the Bells specifically, so it is left blank.

Dives & underwater footage