Reef

Blue Hole

Dahab, South Sinai, Egypt

Snorkeller-friendly reef top
Best for advanced divers
Expert-level dive
Wall / drop-off

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Type

Reef

Max depth

100 m

Level

Expert

DepthSaddle 6m; the Arch ceiling at 55m; the hole bottoms out just over 100m

LocationA few kilometers north of Dahab town, reached by road along the coast.

ConditionsShore entry over the saddle, with clear water and little current. The hole itself is dived and snorkeled at recreational depth; the Arch is a technical dive on mixed gas and twin sets, never a single tank.

Overview

The Blue Hole is a sinkhole in the reef table, closed off from open water by a shallow saddle at about 6 m and bottoming out just over 100 m down. What kills people here is a tunnel. The Arch runs through the seaward wall with its ceiling at 55 m, and from inside the hole it looks under 10 m long; it has been measured at 26 m. At that depth on air a diver's judgment is already going, the far end is three times further off than it appeared, and there is no shallow exit anywhere along it. Estimates of the dead run from around 130 between 1997 and 2012 to more than 200 in total, and nobody has an accurate count because the deaths are not officially recorded. Memorial plaques left by families are fixed to the cliff above the path down to the water, each carrying a name, a date and an age.

Dive plan

The ordinary dive stays inside the hole. Entry is across the saddle at 6 m, the wall of the sinkhole is followed round at 20 to 30 m, and the exit is back over the same saddle. Snorkelers work the rim, where the drop from the reef flat into blue water is visible without any gear at all. The Arch is a different dive and a different qualification. Its ceiling sits at 55 m, the swim through is 26 m, and the seaward side opens onto a wall running past 120 m. The entrance is hard to pick out from inside the hole, and the second way this site kills is the diver who has missed it and keeps descending to look, over a bottom that is nowhere in reach. The plan has to be built around gas, depth and a hard turn point rather than around what there is to see.

What to see

The rim and the saddle carry ordinary shallow reef life, and the interest of the hole is the shape of the water rather than what lives in it: a circle of reef flat, then nothing underneath. Coral cover on the outer wall, reached from El Bells to the north, is far better than anything inside.