As I said yesterday, the reason I’m even in Caye Caulker Belize now was to play Jacques Cousteau and dive the Great Blue Hole… which also happens to be my favorite, a World Heritage Site.
Great blue hole, photo cred: http://cdn.belize.com/
While many people think the cost of diving the Great Blue Hole (3 tank dive-day for $240) isn’t worth the reward, I don’t know how you can be a serious diver, come to Belize and not dive it even though it means getting up before the sunrises to show at the dive shop (in my case Frenchies Diving).
Frenchie’s Dive Shop in Caye Caulker
Frenchie’s did offer us a breakfast of bread, cheese, vienna sausages and coffee, but I was up even earlier to make my own because I’m trying not to eat wheat, sugar, or dairy at the moment.
Blue Hole dive breakfast at Frenchies
We then boarded the boat and headed off for the two-hour boat ride to the Blue Hole.
Frenchie’s Dive Boat
We were the first to arrive at the Blue Hole and quite honestly, I wasn’t sure we were there. I could see shallow coral arcs from the dive boat, but nothing was so apparent as the Blue Hole is from the air.
The blue hole is basically a sinkhole or a giant flooded cave (even with stalactites!) and is 1000 feet across and 407 feet deep. It was first made famous by Cousteau when he decided to dynamite the reef, so his ship could enter as he wanted to chart its depths and then later declared it one of the top 10 dive sites in ALL THE WORLD. The Discovery channel has also rated it one of the 10 most Amazing Places on Earth.
Blue Hole from Dive Boat
So here I was, in what is apparently one of the most amazing places on all the Earth. Once we were tied on to the buoy marker, we received a very thorough dive briefing. Frenchie’s appears serious about safety and it was one of the best briefings I’ve had in a while.
Then it was the moment we had all been waiting for, time to jump in and descend… Here’s the truth about the Blue Hole…. you don’t dive it to see sea life, you dive it just to do it. We jumped in, descended to 155 feet for 8 minutes and then ascended for 15 and then had a 5 minute safety stop. Entire dive was 28 minutes… making it THE shortest dive I’ve ever done.
We did see some Caribbean reef sharks but they were even deeper than our 155 meters so getting good shots of those were a no-go. We did about an hour surface interval as we headed off to our next dive site, ate watermelon and enjoyed the sun before jumping into our second site at the Lighthouse reef, Half Moon Caye Wall.
This was a beautiful coral wall with swim-throughs and really healthy balanced coral formations, along with some smaller fish.
After a good 50 minute dive we surfaced and headed off to Half Moon Caye for lunch….
It was absolutely beautiful on Half Moon Caye and I found out that it was the first protected area of Belize and it makes the eastern most landmark in Belize. There is also a red-footed booby nesting area on the island so after lunch I went on the short trail to check it out.
We spent about an hour and a half eating lunch and exploring the island before re-boarding the boat to head off to our next dive site in the Lighthouse Atoll, called Aquarium.
After completing our third dive which was also 50 minutes, it was time to board the boat and head back towards Caye Caulker. After an hour we arrived to the Turneffe Reef area and we had a short boat ride-break, complete with Rum Punch and snacks :)
Rum Punch post dive day
So there it is, another 3 dives marked into my belt and the Blue Hole to boot. While it may have been my shortest dive ever, it was interesting and the beautiful reef and sea life at the other two dive sites more than made up for everything that the Blue hole was not.
//The I.A.
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Diving Destinations – Great Blue Hole, Belize As I said yesterday, the reason I'm even in Caye Caulker Belize now was to play Jacques Cousteau and dive the Great Blue Hole...