Bahama Blue Hole

While on the beautiful island of Abaco, Bahamas we found an organization, Every Child Counts, which was inspiring and perfect for us to work with.  Our goal is to promote a vacation/volunteer exchange program that will bring much needed medical specialists to this quaint island.  A tropical paradise vacation is always an excellent trade for helping others, so we set off to see what this island had to offer.

Dive Abaco came to the rescue when Keith, the owner, dive master and captain set us up with gear and took the time to tell us about the island and some of the underwater sites available.  He told us about reefs riddled with sharks and coral, about caves that went back for 1000's of feet, about places you would see lobsters 2' long..... And then he told us about a freshwater pond, filled with murky water, a sulfuric smell and no wildlife.  We decided to check it out!

After an hour of driving into the woods, where the wild horses live, we finally reached our destination.  The blue hole is a perfectly round, extremely deep, refreshingly clear blue pond that spread out before us like a sanctuary from the bustle of civilization.  Excited to see what this tube into the earth would provide we donned our scuba equipment and dove into the clean fresh water.

The walls were a compilation of sheer cliff, stalagmites and stalactites.  The visibility was over 35 feet in the late afternoon sun, the water temperature a perfect 75 degrees.  As we dove deeper into the sink hole we passed green water beetles almost 2" long and found opaque crabs on the otherwise barren rock cylinder that encompassed us.  At a depth of 45 feet we reached a halocline, where the fresh water began meeting with salt water coming from the depths of the island and causing several unusual effects.  The first was the temperature jumped up approx 20 degrees and the second was the thick murky settlement of debris that sunk below the fresh water and sat on top of the denser salt water.

At a depth of 50 feet you could not see your hand in front of your face while diving through the layer of mud and eeriness that blanketed you with heat and disorientation.  Ten feet deeper and you were in crystal clear salt water but still engulfed in complete darkness with the sunlight unable to penetrate the ten feet of dense sulfuric particles.  The walls are still bare and perfectly spherical.  Without a flashlight you could float indefinitely in this underwater twilight zone without knowing which direction to turn to.  

They say the Blue Hole goes down 254 feet but we didn't make it that far.  
Maybe next time?  Maybe with you?