The Great Blue Hole! Or – the big blue hole as I keep lovingly calling it. I did not take this picture, I took this from Tripadvisor. When assessing how I wanted to see the GBH I decided to dive it instead of fly over it. I do very much want to fly over it one day to see how magificant it really looks, but at least for this trip around – if you want to see it through my eyes, it will be from under the surface!
When Sierra and I decided on Belize, it was mostly for this. It’s hard to see this pop up on google and NOT immediately go see it! Since our reunion was going to be around diving – OF COURSE we needed to go see this.
I’m going to be honest with you – after my first google search about diving the Great Blue Hole, I decided it would be best for me not to search anything else about it and just enjoy it in the moment. Why? Because the first photo absolutely, 100% freaked me out. How deep was I going? How many breaks to resurface did I have to take? Are we suuuuure I should be doing this with only 15 dives under my belt? How dark was it going to be? SLAMS LAPTOP SHUT. NOPE!
Day of, I was getting more and more nervous – and then when Si decided to snorkel that one instead I really started to question my decision! I’m not a huge fan of water to begin with so this was already a stretch, but I was here now, with brand new mask that I haven’t tried before, after a year since my last dive – but sure, let’s go 53′ deeper than my deepest dive.
Master Diver: “OK FRIENDS! Here’s how this is going to go. This is a 28 minute dive. Once we’re all in the water we go down together on my mark. At 30′ we’re going to spend 5 minutes letting you all figure out your buoyancy. If any of you cannot get stable during that time, we’re sending you back to the boat. At that point we’ll go down to about 95′ where the hole opens up to the start of the caves and stalagmites. From there we will go swim into the partial cave – you will have about 8 minutes down there before we have to come back up to 15′ for a 5 minute decompression stop.”
Considering most of my dives last closer to an hour, 28 minutes went so fast. I kind of expected there to be more ‘fanfare’ when we got down to depth, but it happened quickly, didn’t feel as different as I thought (or that much colder. 81 degrees on the surface, 78 degrees at depth). It was stark: no wildlife, no color, barely light, just dark, long, creepy point shapes from the ceiling of the cave. We swam between them and then almost immediately surfaced. I was shocked at how fast 28 minutes went.
It felt anti-climactic while we were down there, but looking back at the videos and photos – it looks SOOO COOL. Especially with the 360 view – you can see the opening of the hole. Swimming between the 150,000 year old stalagmites was super cool at the time but looks even more impressive from 3rd person point of view. I can’t believe I got to do that!
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