UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

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

Getting into a drysuit in an air-conditioned room, looking out of floor to ceiling windows at the desert is an interesting experience

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Deep Dive Dubai is absolutely immense

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You will need several dives to fully explore all levels I n May of 2017, I got on a plane. This was not

an unusual occurrence for me, as I regularly traveled 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 worldclass 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 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

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

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 no-entry 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

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Deep Dive Dubai is like an underwater theme park

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Freedivers can also dive Deep Dive Dubai

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Advanced filling station

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Freediver Nataliia Zharkova chilling in Deep Dive Dubai

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

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‘Tree roots’ run through the ruined cityscape

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Football table in the arcade 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,

If you are curious to explore Deep Dive Dubai but do not want to venture under the surface, snorkeling is a great way to discover the wonders of the sunken city below. This is a great family activity, and everybody can participate.

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 over three million gallons 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 86 degrees F. It has to be chilled as the average ground temp around the pool is 107 degrees F!

I could continue waxing lyrical about the marvels of engineering that have gone into creating the world’s deepest pool - 50ft 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

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Inside the library

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Arcade games for divers

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There are many areas to explore with plenty of photo opportunities

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Graffiti covers the walls of the cityscape

The hyperbaric facility in conjunction to the pool have been designed not just for safety, but for research

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 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 198ft, as well as the multiple shallow levels of the sunken cityscape. Yup, that’s right, the pool is designed around the concept of a postapocalyptic world, so you will see all manner of interesting objects and environments. Many of the areas shallower than 130ft 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

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Oddities include a telephone and bicycle

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Jarrod Jablonski and Richard Lundgren 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 100ft 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 snorkeling 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 Guinness World Record for the Deepest Pool on 29 June 2021, and opened on 7 July 2021. n

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Dubai

United Arab Emirates

Getting there Emirates, JetBlue and Etihad fly direct into Dubai, which is a major hub for flights going on to SE Asia and beyond.

When to visit You can visit Dubai all year round, but the best time are the winter months, from November to April, when temperatures are more tolerable.

Currency Dirham, or United Arab Emirates Dollar, AED (US$1 = AED3.67).

Entry Requirements Entry requirements are shifting all the time due to COVID-19 restrictions. Check current restrictions before you travel.

Electricity Dubai operates on a 230V supply voltage and 50Hz, so you will need a suitable adaptor for US plugs and devices.