Despite the wonders surrounding me of totally unexplored waters, I couldn’t keep my eyes off my own dive watch. It was as if I thought something supernatural was about to happen, the numbers and readings on the watch would start flashing and changing into glyphs and symbols unbeknownst to humankind. On the bright side, I did at least (and for once) feel rather qualified for the dive I was on. Any earlier in my career and I would have been way out of my depths, literally. Even though I had been a certified deep diver for a few years now, you needed to be extremely comfortable with your own abilities in order to do one like this. Marla and I were diving in the deepest blue hole on the planet: Taam Ja’.
But it wasn’t the depth that was making me obsessively stare at my dive computer. I had been deeper than meters before. It was where we were. How little was known about it. And the fact that there was only one other woman in the world who had attempted to do what we were doing! When we hit the 25 meter mark, the water was noticeably colder. By 30 meters, the light was starting to fade.
In these unilluminated waters we encountered a nearly vertical wall that was covered in what looked like red, black and brown algae. But that was the extent of the life we witnessed at that depth. There were no sounds except that of our rhythmic breathing, which as always was in lock step. The haunting nature of these depths had Marla and tethered so closely together we appeared almost as “conjoined” divers. But it was clear this was one of those moments where the “buddy rule” couldn’t have mattered more. Marla’s eyes were huge and frightened behind her tiny, low-profile mask, which was something I’d never witnessed from her before on our dives together. Typically, our pairing as divers was something calming and reassuring, but this dive was an exception. And I had a few ideas of why that was the case.
When you are in a dive buddy pair like Marla and I, you are able to read their body gestures, their hand signals, their every movement as if it is your own. You’ve learned to speak another language down there, a “sign language” that most divers can understand, but only the two of you can fully comprehend. These types of communication are unique to diving pairs, and not necessarily something taught in the text (albeit there are some obvious examples that most divers use). But you learn it with time, and after diving hundreds and hundreds of times together, in every condition imaginable.
Wide eyes for Marla meant equal parts amazement, terror, and curiosity. But my overly cautious watch checks were saying, “let’s stay alive so we can do this again!” How we got to this very spot, and why we were able to conduct this dive was a bit miraculous, and I could tell that Marla was feeling extremely thankful the second we hit the mark set in our dive briefing only moments earlier.
We didn’t have a lot of time at 45.5 meters, as we were diving with an open-circuit kit. That means we were breathing from the kit and then exhaling our air, bubbling up the water around us. Alternatively, there’s diving where you use a closed-circuit kit, which allows you to recycle all or some of the air you breathe out back into your unit. Because of where we were, and our training at the time, we were not able to dive on the aforementioned rebreathers—named very obviously for the purpose it serves!
However, we only had access to the good old fashion open-circuit option where we were breathing 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen and 1% “other” gasses (e.g. argon) through our regulators. The chill I was feeling through my body had me clenching down on my regulator, nearly breaking through the mouthpiece with my teeth. As we started to slowly make our ascent to the warmer and brighter waters above, Marla and I added some distance between us, and commenced our job at hand: documenting this place that only six people on earth had seen up close like this—we were numbers seven and eight.
We grew closer to the wall, with its obscurity and alien appearance drawing us closer and closer to it. When we drew our hands closer to the algae, it began to wobble and sway like some kind of jello. And getting even closer than that would cause it to BURST into a million particles, producing a miniature explosion. Upon such a “burst,” Marla and I were able to take a look at the true surface of the wall, which appeared to be something similar to limestone, behind that strange algae. We couldn’t help but compare the “exploding algae” to breaching the Cronenberg-like threshold of the “upside down,” as portrayed in the Stranger Things series.
But besides this weird wall of otherworldly algae, there was nothing else down there with us. We were completely alone in a hole that dropped 450 meters below sea level. Void of life, this was a chasm that harbored secrets, but what those were we could not tell you in the slightest. Where it descended below that 45.5 meters was an utter mystery. As we worked our way up the wall, and moved away from the mini explosions, the water was clear as could be. It was also completely still—no currents, no surges. At times, it almost felt like we were in bathwater, or perhaps not even underwater at all.
When we got back to the rim, sitting at around the 5-7 meter mark, there was a very defined pycnocline—a boundary that divides layers of liquid that have different densities. If our fins were up above 5 meters, and our bodies were horizontal at 5 meters, you would not be able to see our fins. And, when part of our bodies were in the pycnocline, the water became so warm it felt as if we were taking a bath. Below that, we were back to the cold. Our bodies felt confused, disoriented and amazed simultaneously. The seafloor looked like another planet, flat as can be covered in the algae, with sand and sediment underneath it.
Making our ascent, and conducting our safety stop—half in the pycnocline, and half out of it—we were hardly able to see one another. And by the time we made it to the surface, we were holding each other screaming at the top of our lungs. Celebrating, cheering, nearly in tears. We kept screaming “woooowwwwwwwww!” Just utterly amazed at the opportunity to be here, at this moment, by sheer coincidence and chance. The only reason we were able to do this was reaching out to the right person, at the right time, and actually being in the right location at that very moment in history. It was all pure luck, if you ask me.
Why us? Because we asked and we just so happened to have the skill set needed by the team who discovered it. Dr. Juan Carlos Alcérreca Huerta, leading the ECOSUR University research team, had found the blue hole after being clued in by local fisherman, Jesús Artemio Poot-Villa, who had discovered it with his father 20 years earlier. Jesús sat on the discovery for quite some time, unaware of the breadth of its true significance. He finally told Juan Carlos of its existence after meeting the scientist while he was conducting research monitoring the Chetumal Bay and nearby rivers, and the rest is history. The commercial city of Chetumal, Mexico in Quintana Roo just so happened to be across the border from where we were in Belize.This made it easily accessible upon the announcement of their discovery, and we were able to get there right in time to be some of its first visitors.
The team needed divers who could capture footage for them. The content the university was sitting on all came from a GoPro and most of their dives were conducted on murky days, with low visibility and the need for underwater torches. That wasn’t the case upon our arrival, even though the surface was choppy as can be. Thankfully taking my seasickness meds right on time, I did not throw up on the boat ride over, or in my regulator, which quite honestly happens to me from time to time. But getting out to the blue hole from the mainland is said to never be an easy or calm crossing.It’s always faced with bizarre challenges at the surface which is why no one else had found the blue hole until now. It’s nearly impossible to see from the surface, even on a good day!
So, that’s what we did. We went down, we captured content, and we lived to tell the tale. Our documentation was used to contribute to the team’s next chapter of science and discovery, aiding in finding out more about this wild natural formation that was sitting right under our noses, all this time. We had recently dived the Great Blue Hole in Belize, taking a 2.5 hour boat ride out to sea, coming up to a hole that’s so clear and defined, it can be spotted from outer space. That dive was filled with wow factors: stalactites and stalagmites that are beyond ancient and if you’re lucky, like we were, SHARKS. It’s said that you can even see fleets of hammerheads from time to time. But not here, not in this hole.
Will we ever be back to Chetumal? I don’t know. But this dive will always be etched into our memory, and I’m not sure we’ll ever have an experience quite like this again. Where all the factors lined up perfectly to make us feel like we were “part” of the discovery. There are countless other blue holes across the planet, and they are all different and unique in their own structure, depth and formation. There’s certainly more out there that we don’t even know about yet—plenty unexplored and just waiting to be discovered. But will those new discoveries be the deepest? We’ll just have to wait and see.
To be continued …
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