![]() ![]() "You do your best before you get in it’s a military discipline – you make a plan and execute it, and that’s your best, that’s what brings you back. Tech diving is all about calculating those risks and leaving nothing to chance," he resigns. "Life is risk anything can happen, even in the safety of your own home. Omar is aware of the dangers but, at 51, he still maintains a fresh take on things, balancing out the risk of dying and the benefit of helping out. Legendary Australian diver Dave Shaw died shortly after a record-setting 270-metre-deep dive into a South African cave while attempting to recover the human remains of another cave diver. A diver must form an idea of where the body may have sunk before even getting into the water, considering factors such as weight (how much lead they had strapped to their suit), and where they were last spotted by their buddy. Underwater recovery can very easily go wrong. It is said that over 150 divers have lost their lives in Dahab’s Blue Hole - often considered the most dangerous diving site in the world - in the last 10 years, earning the submarine sinkhole the ominous moniker ‘Divers’ Cemetery’. ![]() It is very hard because you dive deep and you stay down to locate the remains.” “It is a very critical and difficult thing to do – it requires more than just being a technical diver, it takes more than experience. “Recovering bodies is a case by case thing I do it pro bono,” he says. The other half is to ascend, facing the body. He plunges into the bottom of the aquatic graveyard, scans it with his eyes, and follows whatever clues they might have left behind until he locates the decaying human remains – that’s half the job. A technical diving instructor by profession, there are times when he dreadfully puts his diving suit on, preoccupied by his looming encounter with the ghosts of the abyss. Omar has lost count of the bodies he has recovered from the seafloor. You can see their names inscribed on commemorative plaques embedded in a mountain front by the deadly dive site. “I know it like my kitchen,” he says casually between sips of Bedouin tea. ‘The Elder Diver', as he has come to be known, has dived the Blue Hole for almost 20 years, even emerging with a title, one time, after a record-breaking 209-metre dive. Tarek Omar still remembers it like it was yesterday – his first of many ‘missions’, as he likes to refer to those dives for which the purpose is to recover the dead bodies of fellow divers. Their bodies were found locked in an embrace 102 metres deep into Dahab’s infamous Blue Hole. The deep came calling before either turned 25. Two such adventurers were Irish technical divers Conor O’Regan and Martin Gara. Many venture to these inhospitable depths, defying their own human limitations for a few moments of respite from all the mundane banalities that constitute the bane of our existence. The real gold, however, is found in the town’s otherworldly pristine landscapes, imploring you to believe in great things.īeneath the surface of Dahab’s serene sapphire waters, the sea remains true to its treacherous nature. Along the southeast coast sits the town of Dahab (Arabic for 'gold') in all its understated glory a hippie commune, a diver’s Mecca, a bastion of bohemia, and a backpacker’s paradise. Somewhere beyond the earth yellows and sandy browns that stretch into infinity in Sinai, its prodigious coppery mountains tower over the vast blues of the Red Sea. ![]()
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