Dubai

The world’s deepest pool has officially opened in Dubai, and John Kendall was lucky enough to see it – and dive in it – during construction. Here he tells us more about the ultimate underwater theme park, and chats to GUE’s Jarrod Jablonski and Richard Lundgren about their role in the facility

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF DEEP DIVE DUBAI

Oddities include a telephone and bicycle

Deep Dive Dubai is absolutely immense

Freedivers can also dive Deep Dive Dubai

Advanced filling station Football table in the arcade

A line drops to the bottom of the 60m section for freedivers

Deep Dive Dubai is like an underwater theme park

In May of 2017, I got on a plane. This was not an unusual occurrence for me, as I regularly travelled all over the world to teach technical and cave diving classes. Florida, Mexico, Mauritius, Malta, the list of great diving locations was long and varied. Dubai had never featured on my list, so this trip was something different.

Dubai, a city known for its extravagance and wealth, known for the tallest building in the world, known for its desert - it’s not thought of as a world-class destination for diving. Even the residents tend to travel an hour or two away to go diving.

So why was I going there? Before I answer that, let’s go a bit further back in time.

In 2015, world record cave explorer and diving pioneer

Jarrod Jablonski had been approached by the Crown Prince of

Dubai to head up a team tasked with building a world-class diving facility. Not just any kind of diving facility though, this was going to be the world’s deepest pool, with world-class technology and customer service. Prince Hamdan didn’t just want the world’s biggest or best pool though. He wanted the world’s best divers to design and run the facility, and that brought him to Jarrod Jablonski and Global Underwater

Explorers.

The first inkling of this that I knew about was a fairly cryptic email from Jarrod looking for GUE instructors who would be interested in re-locating to Dubai for a minimum of two years, but that any further information would require non-disclosure agreements to be signed. It was not something that I could consider at that time, but a number of my good friends within GUE did disappear into the desert.

Skip forward a couple of years, and I’m on a plane to Dubai. I was going to visit Richard Lundgren, my friend, mentor and diving partner on the Mars Expeditions, to see what he was up to. At the airport I jumped in a taxi with a location on my phone. This got me to a security hut in what looked like the middle of nowhere. This was actually the main entrance to Nad Al Sheba Sports Complex. This world-class sports facility houses some of the most-advanced sporting training facilities in the world. Elite sportsmen and women travel to NAS from around the globe for training purposes, as everything there is absolutely state of the art. At the security hut, I was met by a driver, and we cross loaded my luggage into a Nissan SUV and got driven into the complex. Passing by me were a number of amazing buildings in all manner of organic curves, separated by football pitches, polo pitches, golf courses and many other things. We turned left and the whole vista changed. I was now very definitely in a building site. There was scaffolding

everywhere, cement trucks, barricades and cranes. Asking myself ‘where am I’, I was led through a door (with a noentry sign on it) and down a corridor into an office. I was welcomed by Richard, waved to Jarrod through the window, and immediately got handed a ten-page NDA that I had to sign before I could go any further into the building. Once that was out of the way, Richard took me on a tour.

First we visited the hyperbaric facility. Yup, that’s right, Deep Dive Dubai has its very own, on-site hyperbaric facility. And what a facility it is. A flat entry chamber that can seat ten people in luxurious comfort, while watching TV or movies. All the facility staff were trained as hyperbaric technicians, and they have a hyperbaric doctor on staff as well as others on call. The hyperbaric facility in conjunction to the pool have been designed not just for safety, but for research. A team from DAN have already spent time in Dubai with the team, and I expect to see and hear more from them in future.

From the hyperbaric facility we took a lift down to the ‘front of house’ areas - when I visited in 2017, and again in early 2020, these were mostly bare concrete floors and walls, but you could already feel how the building would flow.

From here we visited the ‘dive base’ - the equipment store room was rack upon rack of Halcyon, Scubapro and Fourth Element equipment, all brand new, and mostly in boxes. I was taken to the gas filling room, and it was not just technologically amazing, but beautifully done. Dual compressors with nitrox membranes, as well as dual gas boosters for mixed gas meant that the facility could easily fill dozens of tanks simultaneously.

From here we went up in another lift and we were on the pool deck. At first this doesn’t look anything special. There is a curved roof above, and water below. It’s only when you get close to the edge of the pool that you realize quite how big the pool is. I got to the edge - which at the time was barricaded with safety barriers - and had a sneaky look down. And down, and down. The water is absolutely clear, and with the lights on, you can see all the way to the bottom. Which is a really, really, really, long way down.

I’ll take a moment here to talk a little bit about the water. The pool filters are designed to filter the entire pool in about six hours. That’s 14 million litres of water every six hours! It’s also not cleaned using chlorine, instead the water is cleaned first using a volcanic rock filter, and then passes through an ozone system developed by NASA to remove any kind of bacteria, then finally it gets exposed to UV light. This makes the water as clean as it’s possible to be. The water is also chilled – yes, chilled - down to 30 degrees C. It has to be chilled as the average ground temperature around the pool is 42 degrees C!

I could continue waxing lyrical about the marvels of engineering that have gone into creating the world’s deepest pool - 15m deeper than any other pool anywhere currently - but I suspect that this is the wrong audience. You lot probably want to know about the diving. A disclaimer here - I’ve dived in the pool, but on both of my trips to Dubai, the facility was still under construction and I was there as a guest of Jarrod and Richard, and so dived with them. I’ve not had the ‘Full Customer Experience’, so can’t comment personally on that, but I expect that, like the engineering, the customer experience will be first class. Getting into a drysuit in an air-conditioned room, looking out of floor to ceiling windows at the desert is an interesting experience. Getting into a drysuit with simply a Fourth Element J2 base layer underneath it is also an interesting experience, being much more used to wearing thick Thinuslate undergarments. Strapping my rebreather on and getting into the pool felt

Freediver Nataliia Zharkova chilling in Deep Dive Dubai Arcade games for divers

A pool dive experience will cost around 1,200 Dirhams (about £240), including equipment and gas (technical packages are more expensive). There will be discounts for group bookings and repeat visitors. www.deepdivedubai.com

You will need several dives to fully explore

Filling tanks

odd - the air temperature is actually kept slightly cooler than the water, so we warm up as we walk down the gentle slope to the entry area. From here we did our checks and swam out over the pit. Looking down you can see the bottom at 60.2m, as well as the multiple shallow levels of the sunken cityscape. Yup, that’s right, the pool is designed around the concept of a post-apocalyptic world, so you will see all manner of interesting objects and environments. Many of the areas shallower than 40m have rooms, corridors and features that you can swim into and through, moving from a games room with arcade machines and a pool table into a parking garage with Mercedes cars, up through a living room with sofas and a TV. All of these areas have been given a derelict appearance, with holes knocked through the walls, and ‘trees’ growing through everything. Don’t think of this place as a swimming pool, this is an underwater theme park - and it’s an incredible, unique experience.

All the time you are swimming around, you’re being watched by the 56 HD remote cameras fitted into the pool, both for safety and to get a record of your experience. The dive safety station has the ability to talk to the divers via underwater speakers mounted throughout the pool. There are also two habitat areas, these are basically air bells, that allow divers to surface and talk while still at depth, and are big enough to be able to fully get out of the water. This is not just a neat thing to try, but an important safety element for divers doing dives to the deeper portions of the pool, as were there to be an oxygen toxicity or decompression issue while underwater, a diver can be taken to a habitat and stabilized.

Talking about safety, all divers in the pool will be using Nitrox 32 for dives shallower than 30m and anyone wishing to go deeper must use Trimix - the facility has instructors on staff for anyone wanting to extend their limits able to teach the full range of GUE and PADI classes. First-time visitors have to dive with one of the guides, but once they are happy then returning visitors will not need to. But this is not just a location for scuba divers. Non-divers can go and learn to dive, but it’s also a hub for freediving. The facility has already had many of the world’s best freedivers visit, train and help develop the freediving at Deep Dive Dubai. There are a number of freediving lines installed, including one all the way to the bottom. There are also snorkelling tours available. Floating midwater I turned to look up, and could see up the shaft, past the city all the way to the roof of the pool building - everything felt very calm. It was amazing to be in such a big place with just two other divers in the water, and I could imagine how much of special experience it would be once the facility was open. The pool was officially awarded the Guiness World Record for the Deepest Pool on 29 June 2021, and opened on 7 July 2021. n

Graffiti covers the walls of the cityscape Inide the library

John Kendall spoke to Jarrod Jablonski and Richard Lungren about the challenges involved with operating Deep Dive Dubai - check out the Q&A on the website: www.scubadivermag.com/ deepdivedubai