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 pausing at before you enter the water — a sober reminder that almost every serious accident here has happened in the Arch or on uncontrolled descents into the interior. The Arch's blue glow is visible from 52 metres inside the sinkhole, and 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, and local lore still surrounds it. The first recorded modern dives took place in 1968, and commercial diving operations were established by 1982, after Sinai's return to Egyptian control opened the coast to tourism. In the decades since it has become one of the most visited shore dives in the Red Sea and, through its deep Arch, one of the most storied: the memorial plaques at the shore entrance have grown over the years, almost all of them marking divers who pressed into the Arch or the interior shaft beyond recreational limits. The dive that most visitors actually make — the outer-wall drift from the Bells — carries none of that risk.

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. The Blue Hole lies within the EEAA's South Sinai protectorate network — the Ras Abu Galum protectorate, declared in 1992, with the Dahab marine sector added in 199612.

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.