Death Drop in the Blue Hole

With hindsight, it was not the best idea to take my 12-year-old son into Dahab’s Blue Hole, a dive site which claims the lives of adults regularly – albeit usually adults diving way beyond recreational diving limits without the required equipment or skills.

Yet, as The Whore, Zac and I set out with X on our last dive of the day, it feels like any other dive. The boy is allowed to 16 metres now he’s 12, though he’s been diving to 12 metres on all his other dives, because he’s been diving with The Whore’s gal, who is younger. Anywise, the plan is for him to do the dive shallow, at 12 metres, which is how local junior divers usually dive the Blue Hole.

“Are you going to do a briefing?” I ask X, rather nervously.

“We’ll do it at El Bells,” he says, referring to the narrow canyon through which you enter the Blue Hole.

We clump over the rock ascent to El Bells, X bearing Zac’s 20-odd kilos of dive equipment over his head as if it were a beach towel, or perhaps a parasol. The approach is lined with plaques for some of the divers who have died there, a phenomenon which, as when we passed the gadzillion memorial chortens on our way up to Everest Base Camp, always makes me nervous.

“Briefing?” I squeak feebly.

“Zac is buddied with me,” he says. “You and The Whore are buddies. We’re going right, over the top of El Bells.”

That’s it. That’s the briefing. The Whore has banked tens of dives at the Blue Hole; I know it well enough; Zac has never been.

Abandoning all thoughts of the buddy system, a protocol that is only loosely observed in Dahab at the best of times, I fin, in a state of barely controlled panic, behind my son at 12 metres.

We have not been in the water very long when it becomes clear to my, admittedly neurotic, eyes that much is not right about this dive. X, who is an excellent dive guide for experienced adult divers, and typically teaches the more advanced diving courses (Rescue, Divemaster and the like), is diving with my spawn as he would an experienced adult – metres ahead of him, barely looking back.

Zac has done wall dives, of course – even wall dives where, like the Blue Hole, the bottom is at a depth below that from which recreational divers can return. But he’s done them aged 10 with a divemaster within grabbing range at all times.

X is not within grabbing range. Further, Zac has had no briefing about how to manage depth perception in “the blue”, that trackless and mysterious expanse where only your bubbles and the sun can indicate which way is up and which way down.

X fins along at 12 metres. Zac teabags behind him, up and down like a yoyo. X hasn’t told him to stay at his level.

The Whore drops down to 23 metres or so. Abandoning all thoughts of the buddy system, a protocol that is only loosely observed in Dahab at the best of times, I fin, in a state of barely controlled panic, behind my son at 12 metres, occasionally glancing down through the crystal clear waters at The Whore, who’s fine.

The Whore’s eyes meet mine across 15 metres of water, both masked faces a silent howl of “Holy fuck!”

A very few minutes into the dive, Zac has a problem with his fin. In the course of fixing the strap, he loses control of his position in the water and drifts up to the surface.

I signal to X. “Should I go up?”

“No,” signals X. “Stay here.”

Above us, Zac drifts out from the reef, into the blue where, without a solid reference in the form of coral, depth is hard for even experienced divers to gauge. He fixes his fin to his satisfaction, and deflates his BCD to descend.

As he descends, he notices his fin is still misbehaving, and curls into a ball to address the problem — without adjusting his BCD.

And then silently, imperceptibly to him, he begins to drop, like a stone, still looking up at the surface, still above me and long out of arm’s reach, gaining acceleration with every nightmarish split second.

I wonder for a nano-moment whether this could possibly be as bad as it looks, and glance down at The Whore for confirmation.

The Whore’s eyes meet mine across 15 metres of crystal clear water, both masked faces a silent howl of “Holy fuck!”

Diver training drills that in the event of a crisis you should “Stop, think, then act”, so I pause for a fraction of a second to work out what to do.

We’re on the outside, so there’s hundreds of metres of water between us and the bottom. As you use air faster and faster the deeper the water is around you, we’ll likely drown before we even hit.

I know that in this rental BCD I need to get to Zac before about 45 metres or the situation may become unrecoverable. I also know that his descent will continue to accelerate the lower he goes. If I don’t get to him in time, I’ll die chasing my doomed child to the bottom of the Blue Hole, and The Whore will die chasing the pair of us.

In the Blue Hole there is, to all intents and purposes, no bottom. Zac’s on the outside, away from the reef, so there’s likely a couple of hundred metres of water between us and the bottom. As you use air faster and faster the deeper the water is, we’ll likely drown before we even hit.

I don’t dwell on this at the time. What I need to do is fully deflate, pelt down, and get to him, by aiming for a point in his line and below him, as fast as I can. When I get to him, though, we’ll both be “extremely negatively buoyant”, as we divers put it, or, in laymen’s terms, dropping like stones.

So then I need to put enough air into my BCD and into his BCD to stop the descent. We need enough of a bump to “become neutrally buoyant” (stop sinking), but not so much that we swing from “uncontrolled descent” (sinking) to “uncontrolled ascent” (shooting to the surface), during which we might experience “a diving injury” (embolise, blow our lungs or get the bends).

I have no idea how much air is needed but I reckon a second or so’s push of the button should give us enough of a bump, and if it isn’t enough I can always add more.

Further, I must not panic, and I must not panic him. It’s best, I figure, that he resolves the problem for himself by putting his own air in. This thought process takes, I’d guess, under half a second.

I turn head-down, quick-dump whatever air is left in my BCD and fin like I’ve not finned before.

Zac is at 17 metres when I get to him, still curled in a ball, looking serenely up at the surface with a vague expression of surprise on his face. The rapid descent alarm on my dive computer is bleeping away.

Zac is at around 16 metres when I get to him, still curled in a ball, looking serenely up at the surface with a vague expression of surprise just dawning on his freckled face. The rapid descent alarm on my computer is bleeping, tinnily, urgently, like an 80s digital watch alarm, bursting the quiet of the water.

I grab his arm and signal him. “Inflate your BCD.” The numbers on my computer flicker by – 17.3, 17.6, 17.9.

Puzzled, he looks back at me. The alarm’s tinny complaint fills the water. Holy fuck! “Deflate my BCD?!” he signals, bewildered.

Fuck this for a game of soldiers, I think, and push the button to inflate him, then inflate myself. We stabilise fairly rapidly, but don’t shoot up.

When I’m confident we’re both neutral, I look around. X is still at 12 metres. Quite possibly, with hindsight, he wants to be in a position to slow or even halt an uncontrolled ascent, although at the time I’m extremely aggrieved not to find him right by us signalling “Are you OK?”

Calmly – for calmness is a prerequisite in a dive professional, one of a myriad reasons why I will never be more than a recreational diver – X beckons Zac up to him to continue the dive.

Somehow – neither of us are quite sure how, since Zac’s air consumption is usually better than many adult divers’, but then I didn’t check how much air he started with, and nor did he – Zac has only 50 bar of air left.

X puts him on his secondary and, with my spawn safely on the leash, attached to X by the bungee cord of a shared air supply, I relax and drop to join The Whore at 24 metres.

Well, I say, “relax”. I fin so concertedly forwards that I actually overshoot the exit, ignore X’s warning rattle, and The Whore has to physically grab my fin and signal me.

One of the large ex-army chaps I met in Koh Tao when Zac played victim on their Rescue Course was adamant it was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, and presumably “Afghan” wasn’t exactly a leisure cruise.

That dive was, The Whore and I conclude over beer and shisha, quite the clusterfuck and, actually, arguably worse than it felt. While Zac and I performed the death drop, she had been preparing to grab us both and inflate fully at the same time, an extremely high-risk strategy which she figured was her only chance of stopping the two of us if we didn’t stop ourselves.

Zac points out, rather woundedly, that when I’d got to him he’d just noticed that The Whore was closer than she should be and the surface further away than it should be, and he was about to do something about it. He further points out that I opted to grab the arm with which he operates his BCD. D’oh!

Anywise, we collectively decide it would be no bad idea for Zac to get his junior advanced certification, which will give him the handle on depth and buoyancy he needs, and that I should front up for a dive computer with a depth alarm which will warn him (not to mention me) when he hits his chosen limit, or ascends or descends too fast.

The Whore, and dive instructor friends online and off, recommend I do my Rescue Diver course, a qualification I hadn’t really figured on doing until I was well into three figures of underwater hours, mainly because one of the large ex-army chaps I met in Koh Tao when Zac played victim on their Rescue Course was adamant it was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, and presumably “Afghan” wasn’t exactly a leisure cruise.

Plus, I’ve still got so much basic stuff to learn.

Ultimately, you can rely on no one under the water but yourself. And The Whore, of course. I can always rely on The Whore.

After a suitably sedative volume of Stella, I feel quite calm when I roll into bed.

But I wake up, shaking, several times in the night, seeing the death drop, and dreaming of the death drop continuing into the dark depths below. Flashbacks will plague me for weeks: it’s a form of diving PTSD, and, though my version’s mild, it’s real.

Zac, who survived a week with an untreated broken arm in Mongolia with remarkable equanimity, seems entirely unmoved by this latest adventure. Like a cat, he seems to have nine lives. But I’m now rather more protective of the remaining six or seven than I was.

Further, I’ve learned an important lesson, one that you don’t often learn in hot-country diving, where dives are always guided and the assumption is that guides are also babysitters.

Ultimately, you can rely on no one under the water but yourself.

And The Whore, of course. I can always rely on The Whore.