Blue Hole
Interesting facts
- Trained freedivers swim through the Arch on a single breath, passing beneath a rock ceiling that lies about 55 metres below the surface.
- In April 2000 a 22-year-old instructor, Yuri Lipski, sank alone to 115 metres; his helmet camera, later recovered intact, recorded his final minutes.
- Irish freediver Stephen Keenan died at the Blue Hole on 22 July 2017 while acting as safety diver for the Italian freediver Alessia Zecchini.
- Keenan and Zecchini's story became the 2023 documentary The Deepest Breath, directed by Laura McGann.
- Dozens of memorial plaques, left by families and friends, are fixed to the rocks on the shore beside the entry point, naming divers lost in the hole.
- The floor of the Arch lies at about 120 metres, well beyond the limits of recreational diving on ordinary air.
- Some estimates put the number of divers who have died at the Blue Hole as high as 200, an average of several deaths a year.
Why it is worth it
A few kilometres north of Dahab, on the Sinai coast of the Gulf of Aqaba, the fringing reef opens into a near-circular shaft of dark blue water. The Blue Hole is a submarine sinkhole more than 100 metres deep, cut off from the open sea on the surface by a shallow lip of reef about 6 metres down, known as the Saddle. Deeper down, a tunnel called the Arch links the hole with the outer reef wall: its ceiling lies at about 55 metres, it runs for about 26 metres, and on the seaward side the seabed plunges to more than 1,000 metres. The walls are covered in hard and soft coral and crowded with reef fish, and because the hole is entered straight from the shore with little current, it is one of the best-known freediving sites in the world.
For most divers the Blue Hole is a straightforward dive. The standard route begins further along the shore at the entry known as the Bells and follows the wall to finish across the Saddle at about 7 metres; recreational divers on this route do not see the Arch. The site's reputation comes from the Arch. At that depth nitrogen narcosis, gas consumption and decompression all become serious, the tunnel looks much shorter than it is in the clear water, and divers who miss its entrance can keep sinking with no visual reference. A local technical diver who has recovered many bodies estimated in 2012 that more than 130 people had died there in the previous fifteen years. Local operators now require technical diving certification for the Arch, and a police officer is stationed at the site to check that divers are with a certified guide.
The hole first became widely known during the Israeli occupation of Sinai, when a group of Israeli divers explored it with scuba equipment in 1968; since the 1980s it has been dived almost daily. Dahab itself is a small town known for windsurfing and often called the diving capital of South Sinai, with dive sites for every level. Snorkellers also use the rim of the hole, but deaths have occurred even at the surface, so the site deserves respect at any depth.
Getting there
The Blue Hole is reached by road from Dahab, a few kilometres to the south; Sharm el-Sheikh, the nearest larger town, is about 75 km away in a straight line. Sharm El Sheikh International Airport (SSH) is about 67 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Blue Hole is a diving location on the southeast Sinai, a few kilometres north of Dahab, Egypt on the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba within the Red Sea.
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