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SPACE WALK

Dive into Belize’s Blue Hole for the Thrill of a Lifetime

Published in Caribbean Travel & Life: May-June 1993

If outer space is the last frontier, Belize’s Blue Hole is an earthbound training ground for future intergalactic pioneers and adventurers. Since space-age travel hasn’t reached this part of the planet yet…and Scotty probably won’t beam you out there…just getting to such a hard-to-reach natural phenomenon is almost as adventurous as diving into it.

After two weeks of land-roving Belize’s inland jungles, I headed offshore for the world’s second longest barrier reef and its spectacular coral jungles. By that time, I could have used the cushy-comfy, spoil-me-rotten resorts of Ambergris Caye, an island 35 miles from the mainland that Belizean Minister of Tourism and the Environment, Glenn Godfrey, called the most overdeveloped area of the country. When I hit the streets of San Pedro, I knew this fishing village wasn’t exactly Robin Leach-land – what I consider developed, and what Minister Godfrey considers developed are as extreme as boot camp and Hilton Head. Ambergris Caye wasn’t even the Key West of 100 years ago.

No problem, though. Like the rest of this Central American country just south of the Yucatan border, the caye was friendly and unpretentious…and the jumping off point for my real adventure – an overnight excursion to Belize’s Blue Hole, an almost circular sinkhole with depths of more than 400 feet – still another 50 or so miles out there somewhere in the salty, sapphire blue waters. Two days of scuba diving, and one glorious night at sea, would smooth out the body kinks as nicely as a hot iron on a silk shirt. Only, it seems Belize’s image of rough ’n rugged is shot through and through: The 40-knot winds accompanying our 5 a.m. departure triggered seas that pounded the boat with the gusto of the Chinese Olympic team on a Ping-Pong ball. The three men I had just met on Ambergris Caye who chartered this retrofitted shrimp boat with me agreed: Belize’s potholed highways were Cosmo-complexion smooth by comparison.

But once inside the protected water of the coral reef atolls (a circular coral reef surrounding a lagoon), the swells were manageable, the diving pristine. An afternoon dive into Glover’s Reef atoll was only upstaged by a wall dive at Lighthouse Reef atoll that evening: untouched flora and fauna, schools of giant tarpon in the evening shadows. If the plunge into the Blue Hole the next day even matched the surrealism of hanging suspended over a wall of coral that faded imperceptibly into a bottomless blue fluid – well, the 50-mile, open-ocean crossing would be worth it. Of course, the night in a dewy-damp sleeping bag – on the top bunk of a shrimp boat bobbing in the wind – was another matter, entirely.

Dawn whistled in with red-footed booby bird wake-up calls from Half Moon Caye, a national sanctuary for this endangered species on one of the islands of the Lighthouse Reef atoll where we overnighted. Unlike the Pacific Ocean, which is chock-full of atolls, there are only four of these circular coral reefs in the Atlantic Ocean. Three of them are located in Belizean waters, and the uniqueness of the Lighthouse Reef atoll is that it is also a blue hole (name comes from the dark blue color of the deep water surrounded by the lighter blue of the shallower water).

When Jacques Cousteau and his team of expert divers explored this particular blue hole in the 1970s, there was speculation that it was connected by subterranean chambers to Belize’s inland blue hole in the Maya Mountains, some 150 miles away. However, the source of the fresh-water flow into the atoll has not been confirmed. Nor has its depth. More recently, marine biologists studying water quality on Belize’s more than 200-mile long coral reef have also explored the Blue Hole, and they have identified new life forms at the deeper levels where salt water and fresh water mix. Hundreds of blue holes that mesh salt water at some point with fresh water permeate the Atlantic, in particular, the Bahamas. But Belize’s Blue Hole stands apart from all others: In 1991, Outside magazine ranked it among the five “must-do” dives in the world.

By 9 a.m. we were snorkeling to the interior edge of the coral ring, positioning ourselves for the dive into the Blue Hole. The nanosecond we released the air from our buoyancy control devices, and drifted slowly into the black abyss, I knew this dive was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. As always, the free fall though liquid space was a thrill akin to skydiving. Weightless. Ungrounded. Tactile free. But this fourth dimension took an even more bizarre twist as we arrested our descent at 140 feet: We were in a cave where light diminished with each foot we dropped, where massive stalactites disappeared into inky nothingness. I saw no fish, no sharks, no plants. No underwater life as usual.

Down in this deep, dark void I realized Belize’s Blue Hole is a misnomer: It’s really a black hole…and this was the closest I would ever get to a walk in outer space.