hi all,
I was watching a tv program call Monty's diving mysteries i think and one of them was " the divers graveyard". It was about the Blue Hole in Dahab and why so many divers died there. The so sad accident of Yuri Lipski appeared on the show.
One of the worst programmes about the place i've ever seen. Utter utter hype combined with idiotic "theories" to explain the mundane. Dressing Tariq Omar up like something out of Lawrence of Arabia was the last straw.
My question is , why was he sinking so fast ? is there any depth where your speed increases because of pressure? was he overweight? I dont seem to understand it.
He did pretty much every thing wrong and wasn't sinking "too fast". A normal descent rate in there is the region of 40m/min purely to maximise your bottom time. He was using the wrong gas, with the wrong equipment with no dive plan or clue and ultimately and not-surprisingly had an O2 hit probably brought on by the extreme narcosis and CO2 retention from the effort to move around. An incident that proper training, equipment and planning would have avoided.
You accelerate as you sink on a dive due to the wetsuit compressing and losing buoyancy (along with the air in your bcd/wing). That's why you need to add air on descent and dump air on ascent on any dive you do. (Open water manual, chapter 1 - pressure/volume relationships). Your speed increases the second you leave the surface.
The blue hole is a very safe, easy dive site for all levels of diving. It has little to no current, is sheltered from the weather,warm water with very good visibility. It's about as benign as you can get. Hundreds of people do the recreational 30m or so dive every day there and tens of people do the 50m arch or bottom on a daily basis all without incident.
Yes lots of people have died there and almost all of those are easily preventable. Normally its Russians or eastern Europeans going way beyond their training, usually using air, getting into trouble and ended up dead. I've been ascending through 85m there before now to be passed by 1 Egyptian guide and 2 Russian customers on single 12l tanks of air with gecko computers going the other way and this isn't uncommon.
Although there are some genuine accidents there as there are with any 100m or so tech dive the vast majority come down simply to human stupidity and are completely avoidable. No need for warped theories about disorientation, magical mermaids, vicious currents or giant octopus which that programme tried to claim - its a deep side, people do it on air, the get narcosis, they get deco, they dont have enough gas, they die.