Blue hole

At 43 meters, I stopped moving, stopped descending.

I was already sinking back down on my way to the bottom of the Blue Hole.

I was under the water for close to seven minutes.

So 18 world records, six world championship titles.

And-

Like what?

First thing was attempt the world record in Dean's Blue Hole in The Bahamas, which is where I was training by that time and was much more reliable in terms of conditions.

Second thing was go well past the world record.

look at my suit.

And many of our destinations as well relate to the color blue, whether it's the Blue Hole in Belize, or we're talking about Patagonia, where you have the Perito Moreno glacier, and so you have those blue colors.

But also, and then you've got the, you know, for the word parallel, you've got the planet Earth and you've got the parallels that go around it.

But also, I remember when I started my company, I remember watching a movie called The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Yeah, yeah, really interesting.

I wanted to also ask, with the blue hole in Belize, do you think that that was ever a cenote before the oceans rose? or that that could have ever been a cenote, or how was that formed, do you think?

Yeah, so that's exactly what it is.

In fact, so a cenote, a sinkhole, a bluehole, those are actually the same geologic formation.

So you can imagine kind of a big hourglass shape that occurs in the earth, and that's from a ceiling that's collapsed down inward on a vast underground chamber.

So, yeah, that's a cenote or a sinkhole as well.

Any idea how deep that is, the blue hole?

Oh, boy, I'm trying to remember.

Then there's the Black Dog on the Sand Roads, which in some tellings is a guide and in others is very much not that and can also be a death omen.

There's the Blue Hole, which sits between Monroe Township in Gloucester County and Winslow Township in Camden County inside the Winslow Wildlife Management Area, which is a nearly perfect circle of blue-green water in a region where every other body of water is that cedar brown we talked about.

It is ice cold in August.

Locals will tell you it is bottomless, that it has whirlpools, that it pulls swimmers down, and that it's one of the devil's doorways.

And you didn't even know.

Eat something light on Kings Highway because the afternoon is a hike.

The blue hole that we talked about in the episode sits in the Winslow Fish and Wildlife Management area on Monroe and Winslow Township line near the blue anchor.

You park and walk in.

Wow.

So we just finished diving the Blue Hole in Belize-

Oh, cool

... which is this really cool feature.

The local harbour has been absolutely amazing over the years with all the different fish that come in and out of there.

And depending on how the wet season... works the vernon islands is probably one of my and gunpoint and the blue holes is probably one of my favorite spots i've been going there for over 30 years and it's not very often that you don't go there and catch more than 10 different species of fish and all different sizes and you just don't know what you're going to encounter as well as the wildlife and the turtles and the stingrays and i've seen dugongs up on the reef And as well as other boats stuck up on the reef that haven't quite timed the tide and helped them get off.

We were nearly one of those boats.

I remember one year we had your mum

We'd go into the blue hole at the northwest vernal like we did one day and saw a big barramundi cod in there and we saw big mangrove jacks that wouldn't take a prawn, wouldn't take anything.

Queensland groper.

I've had Queensland groper swimming around with their backs out of water in a metre and a half of water and swimming between the blue holes and it's absolutely amazing.

Wow.

Now, unlike all those cliffs, this place is pretty accessible and is popular among freedivers for having little current, which is good when you go in depth.

However, despite all those seemingly nice aspects of the Blue Hole in Egypt, This place has taken around 200 lives in recent years.

Now, to be honest, technically, the Blue Hole is a complete average dive spot.

There's nothing extraordinary that would make it more dangerous than any other spot in the Red Sea.

However, diving through the arch at the Blue Hole is no joke.

It's a tricky submerged tunnel that has seen its fair share of accidents.

While there's no official count of how many have lost their lives here, one source estimates that around 130 divers perished there between 1997 and 2012.

That's more than 8 each year.