Photo: Kerstin Olbrich, Team Blue Immersion
A few years back, I saw an article about this dive site titled “The Deadliest Dive Site in the World”. I don’t know why, but in intrigued me! I started doing a lot of online research and looking at youtube videos. I decided to put this dive site down on my bucket list.
Anyone can dive the Blue Hole of Dahab, from kids snorkelling to Open Water Divers. But this is a special site. It is a sink hole that drops down to more than 100 metres, but a very special arch appears passing 50 metres, which connects to the open sea! This is obviously a Tec Dive which has to be done by properly trained and experienced divers. One of the main reasons this site is called the most deadliest, due to the amount of novice divers which try to go down passed 50 metres with basic scuba kit and training!
After completing all my Tec courses, which I started in 2015 and completed the Trimix course a few weeks ago, I was ready to dive the world deadliest dive site! It was a bit complicated to get to Dahab in Egypt! I had to fly from Malaga Airport in Spain to Istanbul in Turkey. I then had a 7 hour wait for my connection flight which was to Sharm El Sheik Airport in Egypt. This was the easiest way to get to Sharm (at the time of writing this), due to the recent security incidents. My flight landed at 2:30AM and then I had to get a taxi through the South Sinai Desert at 3AM for a 90KM journey. I made it to the hotel at 4:30AM.
Guess what?! I had a Camel Safari booked at 7AM, so hardly any sleep. The second reason I wanted to visit Dahab was to dive the Ras Abu Galum National Park. This site is only accessible by CAMEL! We packed all our dive gear on the back of a camel by the Blue Hole, and then made our way to the National Park. It took us just over an hour to get there. Poor camel, carrying all my dive gear, two tanks and weights. The guide wasn’t very happy I was taking my 15kg massive camera with me on the camel! But it got put in a bag and tied to the camel!
Ras Abu Galum was a great experience, we had two dives there and we even got served a Bedouin Lunch in one of their tents.
The next day, we did a Tec check dive in the morning, on the Lighthouse reef, just opposite the dive centre. The instructor was happy with my skills, so we prepared all the gases, kit and plan for the Blue Hole dive in the afternoon! We prepared an 18/40 Trimix in my twinset, 50% Nitrox Stage and an Oxygen Stage for decompression.
We then went off to the dive site! We had 17 minutes bottom time at 60 metres, followed by 16 minutes of deco on 50% Nitrox and 19 minutes on Oxygen. It was an amazing dive. There is nothing deadly about the dive site. It’s probably one of the safest in Dahab. There is no current as you are inside a hole. The arch was amazing, it was definitely worth the trip! I took some GoPro footage and many photos! We saw large tunas under us at what the guide said was about 70-80 metres.
Unfortunately I took the Gibraltar Worker’s Memorial and May Day bank holiday long weekend to come to Dahab, and I only had two days of diving. I have stayed wanting to come back and do the other famous sites, such as the canyons, and who knows, maybe I’ll be full Trimix certified next time I visit Dahab and can dive the bottom of the Blue Hole with the Tunas!