![]() “I said ‘OK, so you’ll need two weeks’ training with me first, and then we’ll film’.” With only a weekend in town, Lipski turned down Omar’s offer and set off alone.Ī YouTube video, viewed almost 10 million times, shows Lipski’s final moments. Omar met Lipski one hour before his dive. Probably the most famous scuba death in the Blue Hole, the Russian-Israeli diving instructor became a household name in diving circles in 2000 after filming his own demise on a helmet camera. ![]() As Omar puts it: “They want to get into deep water, before they get into deep knowledge.” Technical divers, such as Omar and Heyes, frequently swim under the arch, but it’s an expensive hobby requiring lots of training, and many are unwilling to put in the hours. It’s possible to counteract these effects with specialised equipment. Add this to oxygen poisoning, where the gas becomes toxic under high pressure, and anyone continuing to breathe at this depth is on borrowed time. ![]() Much like alcohol, it affects everyone differently, but Caruso says, “no one is immune from the symptoms and if a diver goes deep enough, he or she will lose consciousness”. According to Dr James Caruso, the chief medical examiner for Denver, Colorado and an avid scuba diver, narcosis is often called the “martini effect” where “as the diver goes deeper, the intoxication increases in a similar fashion to drinking more alcohol”. At this depth, it’s possible to succumb to a condition known as nitrogen narcosis, in which breathing gases at high pressure causes mental, and sometimes physical, impairment. Divers have reported seeing light emerging from the tunnel and, believing it was the surface, have swum down to it. It’s like standing in an underwater cathedral.”īut it can be disorientating. Those who descend 100 metres are faced with a 50-metre-high opening to the Red Sea. Below 56 metres, the sea wall stops, revealing a cavernous, 26-metre-long tunnel from the Blue Hole to the open ocean. According to Heyes, this challenge is to scuba divers what Kilimanjaro is to hikers. Many of those who died were attempting to swim under the arch. A bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing.” ![]() “People do 100 dives and think they know it all,” she says, “but they’re not prepared for that kind of depth. She maintains that most of the deaths are primarily the result of hubris. She has dived the Blue Hole countless times and puts the high number of fatalities down to “people being idiots”. Instructor Alex Heyes says: “It just isn’t that dangerous.” Originally from Preston, Heyes, 32, moved to Dahab seven years ago and runs the H2O centre. Others maintain that as long as divers do their homework and exercise due caution, the Blue Hole’s fearsome reputation is undeserved. Deaths of freedivers such as Keenan are also a constant concern, with the sport growing in popularity since Luc Besson’s 1988 film The Big Blue, which brought it to the world’s attention. In recent years, as technical diving (a form of scuba that usually involves breathing special gas mixtures) has become more fashionable, Omar has witnessed a rise in the rate of fatalities. “They were the first bodies recovered from the Blue Hole.” Since then, he says he has pulled more than 20 bodies out of the water, earning himself the grim moniker “the bone collector”. Omar rose to fame in 1997 when he retrieved the bodies of Conor O’Regan and Martin Gara. A technical diver from Dahab, Omar began exploring the Blue Hole in 1992, fascinated by tales of a curse laid upon it when an unwilling party to an arranged marriage drowned herself there. One man who doesn’t venture to guess is 53-year-old Tarek Omar. ![]() Divers in Dahab suggest as many as 200 in recent years. With no public record, it’s hard to say how many people have lost their lives. ![]()
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