Dive no. 167

from a busy place to even worse

We drove further north along the sea with the roads getting bumpier and bumpier, and then around the corner we see a carpark of jeeps and trucks and 100m of restaurants.

Wow! This is the Blue Hole, one of the most famous of Egyptian dive sites, and boy are there a lot of divers here. For one dive site.

Lunch before dive so we settled in a restaurant and were passed a distinctly non Egyptian menu from which to select. I settled for coffee. It was only when the guy came round twice with a vegetable pizza he was convinced was for our table that we accepted it.

So on with the dive I suppose...

We entered the water at The Bells, a dashed rocky entrance described to be like a bath tub, so only a couple of divers can get in at a time. What with the waves and too many divers trying to get in, it was a bit of a mess and some tempers got pushed.

We dropped down in the water and dropped down into the bell. This is a wide crevice with a hole at about (I cant remember), out of which you swim along a rather lovely reef. And we swam and swam, gradually getting shallower until finally we were at 6m and swam over the saddle into the Blue Hole (capitol letters!). Unfortunately we saw ** all. Blue green mists of Capernwray. And we were getting cold. There was a sense of emptiness below us (apart from all the bubbles coming up from other divers) which was a little disconcerting not being able to see it, but I'm afraid the wonders of the blue hole went over my head on this dive.