Doomed to Fail - Ep 99 - Dying in the Deep: The Blue Hole

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Farz just wants everyone to have a panic attack - today, he talks about one of the places on Earth where people keep diving and dying. We travel to Egypt at the edge of the Red Sea to The Blue Hole - where divers challenge themselves to swim under an underwater arch - unfortunately, it's a lot harder than it sounds, and some don't make it back. He tells the doomed story of Yuri Lipski who brought a camera with him and we can watch as he gets lost under the sea. It's very scary.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Sweet, we're back, and it should be a Wednesday when you're hearing this. It'll be Wednesday. So hopefully y'all have had a fantastic week. We are glad to be joining you midweek. We're going into the weekend soon. I have no idea what I'm rambling about at this point.

But Taylor, how are you doing? Good. Good, good, good. I am, it is, I think I said last, or last episode, it's raining, but which is so good because we had two baseball games today that got canceled. So that is great. So I can just, like, pack and be ready to go because by the time you hear this, I'll be in Tokyo. I've realized, you know, it's funny because I think of myself as like, there's always

something going on. Like, there's always a schedule. There's always a plan. There's always a thing to do. It is never like just like pure unadulterated downtime. And then I think about your life. And I'm like, it's, I probably have it easier than I think I have it. Like the schedule that I've given to the grandparents for the time that we're away is like, okay, so 415, orchestra, 450, Spanish, 512, piano, 6 o'clock, baseball.

Like it's, oh my God, it's insane. And you're working. And Juan is working. and you're shopping for a Subaru and you're deciding on the color green. It's just like so much. I know. So, kudos to you,

Taylor. I do not, I definitely do not have what it takes. I mean, you fit your life into the time that you have. You know, like, I feel like when I was childless and whatever,

I was like, I'm so busy and tired. And I'm like, well, I'm so busy and tired. Like, I don't, I'm doing like a thousand times more stuff.

I'm, doing this. Right. Awesome. Right. That's a good point. You fit your life into the time

you have. That's a really good way to put it. Yeah. So cool. Well, we're doomed to fail. Thanks for joining us

again. We're going to be covering my side of the episode spectrum today. I'm going to stop referring to things I do on the spectrum.

That's not a good book. But that's what we're going to be doing. I'm going to start actually. Well, you know what? I'm going to leave it

for the end. I was going to answer some questions first, but we'll leave that at the end. So. Taylor, today I'm going to be covering a story about a place that is a type of place that I have tremendous fears of. And I feel like we kind of have touched on this before.

I know I've talked to you about it before in some capacity, but I don't think I've ever done an episode on it. I literally did a Google searcher. We're like almost 100 episodes, so it's hard to remember exactly what we've covered. and so I had to do a search on our on our podcast for out if I've ever done this topic or not but I'm going to be talking about cave diving which have I talked to you about this or am I making this up

no we've definitely talked about it it sounds awful you're talking about like under the water cave diving right right right yeah not just like spilunking and having it go back you're talking about not spilunky I'm talking about like the most horrifying things combined into one that being being underwater

with no way of getting out being super deep underwater not knowing what's down there being stuck being claustrophic being trapped it's just like the worst of everything yeah we definitely talked about it

but I feel like not like specifically but because it's terrifying and we agree to agree and I don't know why I keep going back to it like there's some things I'm afraid of

that for whatever reason I keep coming back to like in cave diving was one of those like I went through a whole spiel like maybe a year and a half ago where I watched everything YouTube had on

Cave-Dugging Gone Wrong. And then I stopped paying attention to it, moved on to other things. And then it recently just came back up for me, and the algorithms might just know me well enough to know when to kind of poke me on certain topics. I think they just caught me on this one. So that's what I'm going to be

covering. And I want to be referencing several things. Go ahead, sorry. Oh, do you remember how Natalie Wend the actress? You know who that is? she how she was mortally afraid of of drowning and then she drowned yeah and Christopher walking probably killed her right bananas um but yeah what I'm going to go through is I'm actually going to reference a YouTube channel a great YouTube channel like usually these things aren't really well produced but this one's incredibly well produced like these

guys are real pros of it it's called dive talk and it's a it's a usually like a 15 to 20 minute long episode per that is just these dive masters, these absolute pros watching or talking about dives that have gone wrong and what they should have done or what they didn't do that could have been done or what they would have done in those situations. It is really interesting just hearing like that perspective, which again, you know, Monday morning quarterbacking like obviously when you're not in the moment and it's not your own life at risk you're going to think a lot clear than when you're underwater your visibility is

completely clouded by sediment and you're running out of oxygen like totally right but you're going to be like don't don't do that to start with right don't yeah step one don't do it don't do it i i have thought taylor that that is probably going to be like i don't know like that i might be so afraid of it that i might actually do it because I'm so it's it's almost debilitating how I'm scared about I am but I feel like you're going to be like you don't do it when you're like 55 and have like a weird crisis and then like all of a sudden you're gone no no no I'm gonna I'm gonna my midlife price is going to be getting a green Subaru we can drive them next to each other

drive them next to each other so the topic I'm going to cover is actually kind of similar to my last topic. It has a similar distinction as Mount Everest does in that it is a underwater cave system that also has a number of bodies in it that are unrecoverable. And so what I'm going to talk a little bit is about this cave itself and then go into a discussion around the most famous known death within it. And then I'm going to read a listener message. from Nadine that she wrote into us and answered a question that she asked. So let's go straight there for now.

So the KAMV covering is called the Blue Hole in Dahab, Egypt. It is also known as Diver Cemetery. Oh, I hate that. Oh, was this? I think that this is, did you watch The Deepest Breath for this? No, but I did find out. I think that they were there.

Yeah, when I was researching, I realized that deepest breath, I've seen it and like, I saw it on YouTube and I never watched it, but then I was researching this and they talked about it. So yes, if you've seen deepest breath, you'll know what this is. Oh my God, this is so scary. Yeah. Yeah.

And so you've probably all heard of blue holes because there's a lot of them. Like any depression in the sea or the ocean that goes straight down is essentially a sinkhole. And that is what they refer to as blue holes. typically over time what happens is ocean waters carves through the limestone rock whatever it is and creates a cave system and so that's basically what happened here in this part of egypt so i'm going to describe it a little bit obviously you know we know blue holes are but it's important to know what the features are that are kind of around it so again the the blue hole itself is in dahob egypt um which is on the red sea it is located in the middle of a coral reef

within a few feet. It's like the entryway to the blue hole itself. It's like a few feet away from the beach. And I looked it up. I looked up the, not, not y'all, but on Google Maps it has like the businesses that are dotting that area. Isn't this cute, quaint little beach town? They have like cafes and little shops.

It looks absolutely adorable. That's what the guy is deep is draft. They have like a diving school there. I am getting afraid thinking about like swimming 10 feet on the surface above the blue hole. With that underneath you, I know. Yeah. I know. Yeah.

There's a specific. phobia that's called that I definitely have. I absolutely have that phobia and I can't remember what it's called. But it's something about like how the fear of like what the deep water. I forgot what it's called. But anyways. So like I said, it's a tiny little coastal town. It's a bit of a touristy destination. And so you have like the ocean side. You have the blue hole. You have this coral reef. You have this tiny little cute little quaint town. Then behind it you have this like mountain range. So I can see why if you're in the area. Yeah. Go over there. visit it's got to be lovely so part of the reason why fatalities here are pretty high has to do

with some features of the blue hole that people come to dive to and see and to experience it also generally has to do the area as a whole because again it's a touristy spot if you're a recreational diver that it's perfect for what you do like there's people snorkeling in there like there's it's great it's great for all that stuff um and one other ask is that the water temperature is really amazing. It's like 68 degrees, which is good for, well, it's good for diet. It's not at the level where people would be scared or terrified of it. It's 68 degrees throughout the water column. So it's consistently 68 degrees. So people feel like, you know, I'm not doing like a big ocean thing. I'm doing like a small little, there's kids waiting

in the pool next to me. Right. So it kind of lulls you into thinking it's like a benign thing that you're doing when obviously history is going to show that it's not. So feature-wise, there are two distinct parts to the blue hole that are relevant. If you're looking out from the beach over towards the ocean, over the blue hole, you'll notice there's like a part of it that is like visible on the far edge, which is like the outer lip of the blue hole. That is called the saddle, which is the top of the blue hole, essentially, covering its end of the ocean. The other side of it on the northeast part of the blue hole looking out again from the beach side is a feature called the arch. So this was discovered by Israeli divers in 1968 during a brief moment when Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula, which now is part of Egypt.

And that's when they started mapping out this cave and they found this feature that is called the arch. So for context, the saddle part of the blue hole, that's 23 feet deep. So what you're looking at, if you're looking at it from the top down, where you're seeing the rock formation part of it, that's 23 feet under the water. If you're technical enough, you can go down to approximately 170 feet, which is when you see the top of the arch. That part is the key. the top of the arch starts at 170 feet and if you go into it then you swim out 85 feet and you pop out of the ocean and that's what it is that's like what people go there to do that's what the fun thing is to do the depth of where the arch starts is partially why this area is littered with bodies so it's almost at the depth where you well it's it's pretty much of the where you should be a technical diver to do this dive. So being a technical diver obviously means you have certifications and paperwork and all that

stuff. But the biggest thing that it means is that you are not diving on straight oxygen, which we've talked about before. If you drive on straight oxygen, you go deep enough into the ocean of the water column, then you are subject to nitrogen narcosis. You're subject to this feeling of being stupor. You're subject to embolisms. There's a whole host of horrible things that can happen.

So as a technical diver, when you go deep enough, you have to be. be breathing this special mixture combination of chemicals instead of regular atmospheric O2. So if you see the top of the arch, then yeah, you would basically just swim through it. And that's kind of, that's all you're really looking for. Because if you don't get to the top, if you don't find the top of the arch, the bottom of the arch ends nearly 400 feet at the bottom on a steep slope that goes directly into the Red Sea. Terrified. Perfect.

And so a lot of folks go there thinking that, okay, I'm going to be on this cusp of needing to be a technical diver. It's beautiful. The weather's great. The water's great. You know, all this stuff. And they hop in with regular O2 and they either miss the arch or they realize after going in that they don't have enough oxygen or cognitive abilities to go all the

the way through the gateway to the ocean and so that's kind of where the deaths happen couple questions how long does it take to swim down to the top of the arch so i don't know that but i know how long it doesn't take because we're going to cover that wait i i'm going to turn my camera off i didn't hear that say it again so so i don't know how long it takes to descend down to hit the arch i know that it is it is dramatically less than two minutes. So I would assume, based on what I'm about to tell you about this story that we're going into, that you probably should be looking for the arch after descending somewhere around 45 seconds or so. But do you have, you don't have an oxygen tank or you do?

Yeah, yeah, you have an oxygen tank. Well, so a lot of people, so a lot of people have an oxygen tank. But what you're supposed to be, what you're supposed to have is this trimex mix of chemicals. sorry, gases, you're supposed to be breathing. Why again? Because it's deep enough to where oxygen at that depth gets compressed within your lungs in your system, the breathing it causes what's called nitrogen narcosis, which is this intoxication feeling.

You're confused, you're high, you feel a little bit drunkly. That's kind of, that's what you need to avoid so you have your faculty about you to be able to do what you need to do. And then beyond that, you also need to run compression stops. So if you're doing it really diligently, you're breathing this trimax mix and you have planned decompression stops on the way up the water column. That's how you're supposed to do it. But again, given that it's a tourist destination, given that it's like right on that cusp, people are going down there and doing this with regular O2 on their backs. So I'm thinking, okay, that's totally that that clears that it for me.

I'm thinking like, scuba dive for like a really long time, but they don't go that deep. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally. So it's like the depth. It's not like, it takes like two minutes to get there, but you're going so deep that like, it's a problem. Exactly. It's always depth. It is always, always depth.

So rough estimates, I couldn't find precise numbers. Rough estimates put the number of deaths at the blue hole. It's somewhere around 200 people. most recreational diving here started like in the early 2000s so that's like the timeline you're looking at so roughly two debts a year give or take happened here this blue hole we're going to go over one of those stories here now so on april 28th of 2000 a russian dive instructor named yuri lipski visited dahab with the goal of diving blue hole he was warned against this by the local dive expert who was certified for technical diving based basically this guy was like, hey, he asked, Yuri asked his technical diver to take him down and he was like, I'm not going to do it. He asked him twice and he said no. And that guy's name was Tark Omar. Part of the screenshots that I saw when I was researching this was from the deepest breath. So I think he's in that, right? He probably is. Yeah. So anyways, Yuri decided against Tark's advice to take this dive. And so on this day on the 28th of 2000, he put on a single tank. of atmospheric pressure of two strapped weights in a GoPro to himself i i wrote gopro but no it was not a GoPro he was not doing a GoPro with it like he had like a real camera like this is a real sizable thing and he entered the blue hole so strapping weights to

yourself his martha i know i read that was like i don't want to do that i really really don't want to do that a thousand percent no it's like it's like the joke right it's like it's like when You hate something, you're like, just strap waste yourself and walk off the pier. But you're legitimately doing this. So it looks like he entered the water at around 5 p.m. or so. But I don't actually know for sure if that's local time or not. I'll tell you how we know that here in a minute. He never came back up.

He never surfaced. And apparently his mother knew what his plans were. And so she presumably didn't hear from him, assumed the worst. And given how small this little town was, she reached out to some folks and nobody had heard from, Yuri, and she eventually learned of this guy, Tariq, who was the technical dive person on this, as part of the, uh, in this part of Dahab. And so, the assumption was that something happened to him while he was on this dive. So Tariq, at this point, had become the unofficial body recoverer in Dahab. And he decided that he was going to dive in and jump in and see what happened. What is worthy, he says he does this all always pro bono. Like he never charges anyone to do this, which is terrible. I would, I would, I would, I would, I would, I would, charge you a million dollars if you wanted me to go recovered the corpse of your dead person's body. Yeah, I feel like I'd save

people for free, but it wouldn't get a money. Yeah. That's too, that's being too nice. It's gone. It's been too generous. Yes. So, um, so Tart hops

of the blue hole, again, technical diver, he puts on his trimex, does all the things that he's supposed to do, and he goes all the way down to the bottom. So at 400 feet on the C4, he finds, He finds Yuri's body and is able to bring it back to the surface. On it, he finds this camera, which apparently had been weighted to be used underwater up to 280 feet. But somehow this thing still worked.

And it actually captured the entire dive, which is terrifying. What happened? You can legitimately watch this thing. You go on YouTube and just look up Yuri Blue Hole, and it's the first thing that pops up. what you see on the video is that almost immediately after entering the shaft part of the blue hole the part that you're just supposed to send down you can't see anything so it's super dark so if you're even if your lights looking forward you can be swimming right in front of the arch and not know it so he clearly misses the arch you know he misses it because you also miss it you can't see where it's at that's probably when you ask me at what point you hit i was like i don't know because I've watched the entire thing over and over again. I couldn't see where you would see the arch. So for the vast majority of this video,

you're literally staring out into open, like the tunnel that leads into open ocean. You're staring into open ocean, but you don't know that because it's invisible in front of you. So it does not appear that he's monitoring his depth or his rate of dissent whatsoever because the only time you really hear and sense to panic in his breathing

is around the six minute mark from when the dive starts. I say six minute mark, that's when he entered the water. But when you enter the water, you're still like the coral part. It's beautiful. It's blue up there. Like there's other divers down there. There are snorclores. It's like that thing.

And then he enters this part where he's completely alone, this shaft part. But he enters, it's about six minutes in from the start of the video until this point. And you start hearing the panic in his breathing. And you're like, oh, something went. really wrong because you can see that the camera is looking down and seeing ground and it's at that point you hear a beeping happening on this dive computer he's wearing on his wrist and he waves in in front of the camera he's looking at it but you can't really tell what it says it's just beeping at this point so something's gone wrong and he's like realized oh shit something's gone really really

wrong so he's at the bottom he's on oxygen only and he starts kind of stumbling around the bottom like it looks like a drunk person dragging themselves along like a street except you're at the bottom of the ocean at this point um he starts fumbling around and presumably he's trying to release his weights to ascend which again he's suffering from narcosis at this point like he is confused he doesn't know what's going on around him and he's feeling super high super drunk at this point And regardless, if he ascended, if its weights had dropped, the oxygen that is compressed in his lungs would have rapidly expanding because he wouldn't have had the forethought to decompress on his way up. And he also wouldn't have had the tanks to decompress. He only went down there with one oxygen tank.

And so it probably would have killed them anyways if he just ascended all the way to the top. But between the time of seeing kind of what I mentioned earlier of that clear, fresh blue water that was tranquil. and full swimmers and divers until you see the C4 two minutes just two minutes so it went by super quick which like again that's why I'm kind of guesstimating like probably in the 30 to 40 second range is like when you should be seeing this thing given how quickly he dropped but again it's all variable so I watched that dive talk guy the YouTube channel talking about this dive and one thing he said about this is that the weight component of this is incredibly critical because, because, A, you have all your, you have your own body weight. Then you have all your gear. Then this guy also added

on apparently what is a rather large camera system to be able to record all this stuff. And on top of that, there's a distinct difference between how your body, your body buoyancy acts, whether it's in freshwater versus saltwater. And after that, the fact that, the fact that, that there might be parts within the water column that you're hitting fresh water or water that isn't as salient or salient or saline or salty it's not as salty as other parts of the water and so you descend at different levels and so getting this calculation wrong is apparently super super important to making sure that you can time when you should be doing a certain thing in the water column which he obviously couldn't or didn't so one YouTube comment I read on this

that was, it's super poignant if you watch the video is that the line between when things are fine and when things are bad, it's like impossible to discern. You're watching this video and like, again, it goes by it really quick

and you're like, I don't know, I don't know, am I looking into the ocean? Am I looking at the archway? Am I looking at, what am I? And all of a sudden you're looking down like, that's not good. That's the ocean floor. Like, I shouldn't be here. It just happens so seamlessly. And this is the most famous death at the blue hole specifically because we can see it happening

because he recorded, which is super rare. The only other time I've actually seen a video like this was it was from 1994. There was this guy named Dionne Dreyer. He dove into this other blue hole, this sinkhole. Actually, that's not a blue hole. It was a sinkhole because it's freshwater, so they're different. But it was another sinkhole full of water.

it was about 927 feet to the bottom and a diver had tried to go to the bottom before and had died. His name was David Shaw. Apparently his body was then recovered. There's this guy named Dion Dreyer who found it by accident when he was down there at one point.

In 1984, he went down to recover it and he recorded himself doing it. And it's the exact same thing. He said this time he intended to go to the bottom, but when he gets to the bottom, he's hit with the narcosis. And he doesn't know what to do. Like, he's just fumbling his hands.

He doesn't know where he's at. like it's it sounds terrifying like if anybody knows what this feels like please write to it I'm actually like I don't want to know because I would be dead but it's it's got to it's got to be terrifying like you didn't know that you're water like there's so many stories of this that I read where people would be hit with this and then they would either start declosing under like getting undressed underwater or removing their their regulators out of their mouth because they like assume they're like that high on something it yeah it sounds like when you're like um so cold you took out her clothes yeah yeah you know because

you're just like confused and like normal things don't make sense anymore your brain's just playing tricks on you it sounds it sounds horrible but um so that one the dion dryer one that one's called bushman's um bushman's hole that one's also recorded so it's really just these two that i found that were actually recordings of people going through the narcosis part of this on video so you have that in 2014 there was another round of technical divers and you can tell how different it is because you look at these guys they have like hundreds of pounds of equipment on them like all these different kinds of tanks with different kinds of mixtures of them like it is like that's the level of detail you need to go through when you do this kind of diving apparently

and they ended up documenting um three bodies so there's a video that you can actually find um so again this is the dive talk YouTube channel this video is called divers reacted to bodies found at world's deadliest dive site and it's around the 4 minute 50 second mark that you start seeing bodies they literally record these bodies on the bottom of the

bottom of the sea floor and they find three of them apparently these three are somewhat known to the people that live in this part they are all men who died in the 1990s they weren't really

discovered until the 2000s and apparently the reason they're still down there is because they're basically just gelatins inside of a diving suit and so recovering the body at this point is there's no utility to it like there's nothing you'd really be able to bring up and you'd probably die trying anyways and so they just like fuck it leave them down there but um so so anyways that is that is a story i was going to cover for today i do i'll pause there Teller, if you have any thoughts on that or things you want to add. No, that's crazy. I don't think you should go there.

You will know. Yeah, you'll know because there is, there's another part of Blue Hole that's, I don't know, maybe like 20 yards from the actual beach part. It's called Bells. It's a Bell's Passage or Bells something. I didn't write it down. But that's where, like, recreational divers go. That one, you only go 30 feet off. underwater and you actually go through the cave system and you come out the blue hole so obviously

you're not going anywhere near the arch um but apparently on the walk from where you would park your car to where you go to the dive site for bells there's just tombstones of all the people that have died there i saw that yeah yeah yeah there's one that says don't let fear stand in the in the way of your dreams that one's for a guy named james paul smith and i am going to counterbalance that and say, guys, always let fear stand in the way of your dreams, always, like literally just like never, never, never, never, never stop surrendering to fear. I love that. That's really great, yeah.

Can you, can you, can you make sure that that goes my tombstone? Yes. Never stop surrendering to your fear. Perfect. So, yeah, that is, that is my story. I have a little ancillary component I want to discuss about the Everest podcast as well, but I'll pause there for you. No, that's scary. Another scary thing, feel nervous, which is great.

I just love feeling nervous. So thank you for that. Yeah, totally, totally. I can't shout out of the dive talk guys enough. Like, you will spend, if you start right now, you won't stop watching until you're done. You will abandon your life and dreams and just watch this YouTube. video it is so interesting but we did get a message from nadine thank you for writing in nadine always love your questions you mentioned about whether sherpas have summited many times um so actually

yeah so apparently the top 10 most summits of everest of all time have but i've just been shirpas because they keep going back to your point just basically being there for the rich folks were hiring them um and there's one person one shirpa named cami rita which i'm sure i'm mispran thing. And he has summited a record 28 times. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. So. That's so ridiculous that like he can just do that. And he's not like on the news all the time. It's kind of like when you see those, it's kind of like when you see those goats that are on like these cliffs that are sheer rock faces. And you're like, yeah.

What is happening? Like that's really incredible. How is that even possible? school. I mean, I think if you just live there, it's like, yeah, all right, whatever. I'm going to leave and go up to the summit of ever, so I'll be back by dinner. I guess, like, it's just normal. Fine, I'll take your money, rich guy, who wants to do this? But, like, I do it all the time. I don't make you think, like, I don't feel weird about, like, rich people using them for this because it's like, man, like, they probably, they just do this. Like, it's not a big deal to

that, and they can make a more money. So. Really wild. With that said, I am going to let Taylor kind of play us out, and I'm going to mute myself while my dog is barking at probably a squirrel that's outside that's going to drive everybody insane. Wonderful. Thank you, Fars, and thank you, everyone, for listening.

We are going on Spring Break. So next week, I have some re-releases that will be recorded, and then we'll have a new episode mid-April, and we hope that anyone actually has a great and safe and fun time. And if you have any questions, please email us at Doom to FailPod. any ideas any feedback anything would be great and then also we are on social media at doom to fail pod so you can find us youtube instagram all the places and we hope to see you more of you and thank you for listening sweet thanks all cool thanks thanks