Blue Hole

Gear up in a car park surrounded by Bedouin cafes, walk a rocky shore path past a row of memorial plaques, and slip into a narrow chimney in the reef. The Bells drops you to about 28 metres on the outer wall, where the Gulf of Aqaba opens to your left and hard coral covers everything in front of you. Clouds of anthias hang against the wall face. Parrotfish work the reef. Lionfish wait motionless under overhangs. You drift south for thirty to forty minutes at whatever depth your certification allows, occasionally catching a turtle off the slope or a napoleon wrasse rounding a coral head. The reef curves inward, the wall ends, and the saddle at six metres comes into view — a dense coral shelf bridging the outer sea and the sinkhole interior. Cross it and you are inside the Blue Hole, floating above a shaft that drops straight for a hundred metres. Freedivers may be working buoy ropes a few metres away. The interior is calm and clear, but the coral is sparser than the outer wall. The Arch, invisible at 55 metres on the eastern side, is the dive that built this site's reputation. The drift you just finished is what most visitors actually do — and by consistent community account, it is worth the trip on its own.

Two completely different dives share one patch of coastline, and you can see both at the same time. The Blue Hole is a collapsed-cave sinkhole, roughly 25 metres across at the surface, with vertical coral walls falling beyond the limit of recreational diving. On any given morning, recreational divers run the Bells drift while freedivers descend on rope lines beside them and trimix-equipped technical divers vanish below carrying stage bottles. The full range of the sport occupies a single, accessible shoreline. It is busy — and that is part of what makes it strange. This is not a remote pinnacle or a boat-only wall. It is flanked by open-air restaurants. Snorkellers wade in through the same entry. The juxtaposition of the mundane and the genuinely extreme is not found at any other dive site.

The memorial plaques on the shore path are worth stopping at before entering the water. About 130 divers died here in a fifteen-year period, nearly all in the Arch or on uncontrolled descents into the interior. The Arch's blue glow is visible from 52 metres inside the sinkhole. That optical signal has drawn divers down on air without the gas or training to cross a 26-metre overhead tunnel at 55 metres. For recreational divers staying above 30 metres, none of that risk applies. The outer reef is safe, healthy, and worth diving on its own terms.

The Bedouin tribes living along this coast historically avoided the Blue Hole. The first recorded modern dives took place in 1968; commercial diving operations were established by 1982 after Sinai's return to Egyptian control opened the coast to tourism. The fatality record that defines the site's global reputation runs from the late 1990s onward. Technical diver Tarek Omar, who spent years recovering bodies at the site, estimated that approximately 130 divers died between 1997 and 2012 alone; longer-range figures run higher.

The most widely documented case is Yuri Lipski's. On 28 April 2000, the 22-year-old Russian-Israeli diving instructor died at 115 metres during an uncontrolled descent. His helmet camera recorded the entire dive. The footage was recovered by Tarek Omar, who had warned Lipski not to dive, and it became one of the most-watched underwater fatality recordings online. In 2017, Irish safety diver Stephen Keenan died attempting to rescue freediver Alessia Zecchini during a record attempt; the event was later documented in the 2023 Netflix film The Deepest Breath. The memorial wall at the site entrance has grown with each year.

Most operators require a check dive on the local house reef before the Blue Hole — it confirms buoyancy and weighting before the Bells chimney entry. The site opens at 8am and closes at 4pm; morning dives avoid the day-trip buses that arrive from Sharm el-Sheikh around 10am and fill the saddle. Booties are worth packing for the rocky shore approach.

Open-air cafes ring the entry; pre-order lunch before the first dive and eat during the surface interval. A national park entry fee applies (roughly 10-20 USD for foreign visitors — verify with your operator). A policeman is stationed at the site to enforce the certified-local-guide requirement.

Salinity in the Gulf of Aqaba runs around 41 ppt — higher than open ocean — so carry more weight than usual. Nitrox extends bottom time on the outer wall; an orange DSMB is essential for drift diving (yellow signals emergency in Egypt). For technical divers planning the Arch, the standard local progression runs over four days — recon, top of arch, mid-arch, near-bottom — supported by gas blending and stage-tank handling from operators near Dahab's Lighthouse area. Leave freedivers on their rope lines alone unless they signal first.