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.
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.
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
we're back it
should be a Wednesday when you're hearing this it'll be Wednesday so hopefully y'all have had
a fantastic week um we are glad to be joining you midweek we're going into the
weekend soon um I have no idea what I'm rambling about at this point um 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 cancelled 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 um I've realized you know
it's 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 there's 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 4:15
Orchestra 450 Spanish 512 piano 6 o'clock baseball like it's my God that's
insane and you're working and Juan is working yes and you're SHO in for a
Subaru and you're deciding on the color green it's just like so much I
know so Kos to you Taylor I do not I I definitely do not have what it takes I
mean you fit 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 but like I know I'm doing like th a thousand
times more stuff I'm doing this right 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 um so cool well we we're doomed to fail thanks for joining us again um 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 look but uh that is what we're going to be doing um I'm
going to start actually well you know what I'm going to put it leave it for the end never mind I was going to answer some questions first but we'll leave
that at the end so Taylor uh to 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 or search cuz we're like
almost 100 episodes so it's hard to remember exactly what we've covered and so I've had to do a search on our um 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 stu up no we've definitely talked about it it sounds awful you're talking about like under
thewater cave d right right right yeah not just like spelunking and having it
go bad you're talking about no not spelunking 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 claustrophobic being trapped it's just like the worst of everything yeah we definitely talked
about it but I feel like not not like specifically but because it's terrifying and we agree agree to agree and I don't
know why I keep coming 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
diving gone wrong and then I saw 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
um oh do you remember how Natalie Wood the actress you know who that is she how she was mortally afraid of of
drowning and then she drowned yeah Christopher Walkin probably killed her right
bananas um but yeah what I'm going to go through is I'm actually going to reference uh a YouTube channel a great
YouTube channel like usually this 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 um 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
situ it's just 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 clearer than when you're underwater your visibility is completely
clouded by sediment and you're running out of oxygen like totally different
going be like don't don't do that to start with right don't yeah just don't
do 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 scared of it I am but I feel like you're going to be like like don't do 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 uh 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 um and then I'm going to read a listener message from naen that she
wrote into to us and and answer a question that she asked so let's um let's go straight there for now
so the cave I'm going to be covering is called the Blue Hole in dahab Egypt um
it is also known as diver Cemetery hate that oh this I feel that
this is did you watch the deepest breath for this no but I did find out researching yeah when I was researching
I realized the deepest breath I I've seen it and like or i' 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 so oh my
God this is so scary yeah yeah and so you you've probably all heard of blue
holes because there's a lot of them like any depression in the 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 um 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 C the Blue Hole itself is in dahab Egypt um which is on the Red
Sea it is located in the middle of a c Reef within a few feet like the entryway
to the Blue Hole itself is like a few feet away from the beach and I looked it up I looked up the not not yell but on
Google Maps it has like the the businesses that are dotting that area is it this cute quaint little Beach town they have like cafes the
little shops looks absolutely adorable that's what the guy in the deepest breath they had like a diving school there I am getting afraid thinking about
like swimming 10 feet on the surface above the blue hole 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 um but it's something about like how the fear of like what like deep
water I forgot what it's called but anyways um so like I said it's a tiny
little coastal town it's bit of a touristy destination and so you have
like the from the oceans 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 visit go
visit it's got to be lovely so yeah 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 in see into to experience it
also just generally has to do with the area as a whole because again it's a touristy spot if you're a recreational
diver then 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 aspect 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 IFI it it's 68° throughout the water column so it's consistently 68 de 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 thing 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 covering its end the
ocean the other side of it on the northeast part of 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 um 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 um 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 M uh if you're technical enough you can go down to approximately
170 ft 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 ft 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 wide this area is littered
with body so it's almost at the depth where you
well it's it's pretty much at the depth where you should be a technical diver to do this dive so being a technical diver
all 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 nit
Narcosis you're subject to this feeling of being stupid 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 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 like that's all you're really looking for because if you don't get to the Top If
you don't find the top the arch the bottom of the arch ends nearly 400t at the bottom on a steep slope that
goes directly into the Red Sea terrifying um
terrifying 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 um oxygen or cognitive
cap abilities to go all 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'm going 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 the 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 oxygen tank but what you're supposed to be what you're supposed to have is this triex 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 and
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 drunk like that's kind of that's
what you need to avoid so you have your faculties 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 Trix mix and you have planned um decompression stops on
the way up the water column that's that's how you're supposed to do it but again given that this is a tourist destination given that it's like right
on that cus people are going down there and doing this with regular O2 on on their backs so I'm thinking okay that's
totally that that clears it up for me so I'm thinking like scuba divers can scuba diive 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 a problem exactly it's always depth it is always always depth um
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 um most recreational diving here started like in
the early 2000s so that's like the timeline you're looking at so roughly two deaths a year give or take happened
here at this Blue Hole um we're going to go over one of those stories here now so on April 28th of 2000 a Russian dive
instructor named Yuri lipsky 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 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 um 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 um anyways Yuri
decided against T'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 to 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
next thr I know I read that was like I don't want to do that I really
really don't th% no it's like the joke right it's like
it's like when you hate someone like just strap waist yourself and walk off appear like you're legitimately doing this so it looks like he entered the
water at around 5:00 p.m or so um 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 um 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 assume the worst and given how small this little town was uh she reached out to some folks and nobody had
heard from Yuri and she eventually learned of this guy tar who was the
technical dive person on on this on this part of the uh this part of dahab and so
the Assumption was that something happened to him while he was on this dive so tar at this point had become The
Unofficial body recover in dahab and he decided that he was going to dive in and
jump in and see what happened what is worth he says he does this all always pro bono like he never charges anyone to
do this which is kind of noble I would I would charge you a million dollars if you wanted me to go recover the corpse of your dead person's body yeah I feel
like I'd save people for free but I wouldn't that's too that's being too
nice being too generous yes so um so tar hops to the
Blue Hole again technical diver he puts on his Trix 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 C FL he finds Yuri's body and is
able to bring it back to the surface um on it he finds this camera
which apparently had been raided to be used underwater up to 280 feet but somehow this thing still worked and it
actually captured the entire dive which is terrifying like you 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 um 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 descend down you can't see anything so it's
super dark so if your even if your lights looking forward you could be swimming right in front of the arch and
not know it so he clearly misses the AR you know he misses it because you also
miss it you can't see where it's at that's why when you ask like at what point you hit I was like I don't know because I 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 it does not
appear that he's monitoring his depth or his rate of descent whatsoever because the only time you really hear and sense
the panic in is 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 like 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 snorkelers it's like that thing and then he enters this part that
weighs completely alone this shaft part but he enters um 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 it 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 [ __ ] 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 in
that is compressed in his lungs would have rapidly expanded because he wouldn't have had the forethought to
decompress on his way up he also would have had the tanks to decompress he only went down there with one oxygen tank and
so it probably would have killed him 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 flu water that was you know tranquil and full of swimmers and divers
until you see the sea floor 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 freshwat versus salt water and
after that the fact that there might be Parts within the water column that you're hitting fresh water or water that
isn't as Salient or saline whatever you want salty it's not as salty as other
parts of the water so you descend at different levels and so getting this calculation wrong is super super
important 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 wow so one YouTube comment I read on this
that was it's super poiny 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 really quick 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
all of a sudden you're looking down like that's not good that's the ocean floor I shouldn't be here it just happened so
seamlessly um and this is be this is the most famous death at the Blue Hole
specifically because we can see it happening and because he recorded which is super rare the only other time I've
actually seen a video like this was it was a it was it was from 1994 there's this guy named Deon dryer he dove into
to this other Blue Hole the sinkhole actually that's not a blue hole it was a sinkhole because it's freshwat so
they're different but it was another sinkhole full of water it was about 927 ft 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 never recovered there's this
guy named Deon dryer who found it by accident one 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 except this time he intended to go to the
bottom but when he gets to the bottom he's hit with the Narcosis and he's like 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 us I'm
actually like I don't want to know because I would be dead but it's it's
Gotta it's got to be terrifying like you even know that you're under 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 deing under like getting undressed under water or removing their their Regulators out
of their mouth because they they like assume they're on water they're like that high on something it's yeah it
sounds like when you're like um so cold you take off your clothes
yeah yeah you're just like confused and like normal things don't my 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 there were
actually recordings of people going through the Narcosis part of this um uh
on video so you have that uh in 2014 um 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 diers reacted to bodies
found at world's deadliest dive site and it's around the 4 minute 50c Mark that
you start seeing bodies they literally record these bodies on the on the bottom of this Bottom of the Sea for and they
find three of them apparently these three are somewhat known to the people
that live in this part um 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 gelatin 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 would really be able to
bring up and you'd probably die trying anyways and so they just like [ __ ] leave him down there but um so so
anyways that is is that is a story I was going to cover for today I do I'll pause there tell if you have any thoughts on
that or things you want to add no that's crazy don't think you should go there you you'll know yeah you you'll
know because um 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
um it's called Bells it's a Bells 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 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 um counterbalance that and say guys always let fear seeand of the way of your dreams always like literally just
like 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 um so yeah that is that is my story I have a little um uh ants slur
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 um I can't shout out the dive talk guys enough like
you will spend if you start right now you won't stop watching until you're
done like you will abandon your life and dreams and just watch this YouTube video it is so interesting totally um but we
did get a message from nen thank you for writing in naen 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
B have just been Sherpas because they keep going back to your point of just basically being there for the rich folks
who are hiring them um and there's one person one sh named Cammy Rita which I'm
sure I'm mispronouncing and he has summited a record 28 times whoa
yeah yeah so that's so ridiculous that like he 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 it's really incredible how is that even possible I mean I think if you just live there it's like yeah
all right whatever yeah hey I'm gonna leave and go up to the summit of ever I'll be back by dinner I guess like it's
just normal fine I'll take your your money rich guy who wants to do this but like I do it all the time make y yeah it
kind of made me think like like I don't feel as weird about like rich people using them for this because it's like
yeah like they probably they just do this like it's not a big deal to them and they can make money so
really wild um 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 squirr that's outside that is going to drive pretty insane
wonderful um thank you fars and um thank you everyone for listening we are going
on spring break so next week um 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 answering break has a great and safe and fun time and if if you have any
questions please email us at Doom toel pod gmail.com any ideas um any feedback
anything would be great and then also we are on social media at Doom toil pod so you can find us YouTube Instagram all
the places and we hope to see more of you and thank you for listening sweet
thanks all cool thanks