The pale gritty sand stretches away from me, I can see nothing alive in any direction other than my buddies who are clearly finding this as alien as I am. The gear I have dived in all over the world looks bizarre, with huge blocks of lead strapped to the tank, and the full-face mask. It’s like I’m on a science fiction movie set.
Text and Photos by Michel Braunstein
I’m a regular visitor to the Red Sea and am always on the lookout for something different – unusual destinations with unusual dives. While diving in Eilat, Israel, on one occasion, I met Avi Bresler, who runs Dead Sea Divers. He explained to me at length the incredible, otherworldly experience of diving there. It was an easy sell; I was hooked.
Everything about this was going to be unlike anything I’ve experienced diving all corners of the world. The Dead Sea is an inland lake rather than a true sea, lying between Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. The Dead Sea is cut off from both tidal flushing and significant rainfall, and exposed to scorching conditions that evaporate water from its surface. Consequently, salt has become concentrated here to an incredible degree, making this dive utterly different from anything else on earth. In the parched air, evaporation is hugely higher than the paltry rainfall. The dusty desert area has hot, dry summers and warm, dry winters.
The Dead Sea, landlocked between Israel and Jordan, lies over 1,400 feet (430 metres) below sea level — Earth’s lowest point. It stretches 50km long, fed only by the Jordan River. Over the past 80 years, its water level has dropped dramatically due to diversion and evaporation.
It’s not quite the saltiest sea in the world, but at 1,200 feet (300 metres) deep it is by far the largest hypersaline body of water on Earth. Potassium, calcium and sodium salts precipitate out of the saturated water to create magnificent sand-coloured crystal formations on the lake floor.
This saltiness is almost completely incompatible with life — the Dead Sea is as close to anywhere on earth to being completely dead. The salt kills all but a tiny handful of extremophile bacteria and fungi, most living where fissures leach in slightly less salt-rich water. On the rare occasion when significant rainfall gets to the area, dormant algae that can deal with the astonishing levels of salt turn the sea red. When conditions return to what passes for normal here, the salinity rises to quash even these bizarre organisms, and the sea dies once more.
We had a pool session first to increase our familiarity with full-face mask diving. Normal masks and regulator mouthpieces would leave your eyes and mouth rather exposed to the horrific levels of salt. The price you pay is that the airspace in the mask makes your head even more buoyant in this salty sea than it would be in normal diving.
I drove almost three hours from the centre of Israel to reach the inland sea. After a short briefing by Avi, we geared up, quite a process in itself. To overcome the extreme buoyancy of the salty water, I strapped on a whopping 110 pounds (50kg) of lead, distributed around my tank, waist and BC. The result? I was awkwardly front-heavy and could barely stay upright — a far cry from normal diving.
Because of the wide temperature variation during the day, and the scorching summer surface conditions, early summer dives are done in the morning to avoid wrestling with gear in the heat. You put your gear together as close as possible to the entry point, and suit up as late as you possibly can. Water temperature may climb as far as 39ºC during a summer dive, which will make respiration more difficult.
I climbed down the few salt encrusted rough rock steps into the alien sea. The water felt rather thick and oily. The surface is not particularly calm so that transition between floating on the surface and descending is far more awkward than on any ‘normal’ dive. I’d been warned — one little drop of Dead Sea water in the eye is a horrific thing.
Every sensation that has become habit on a normal dive is somehow different. It’s not easy to sink, despite all the weight. It’s also not easy to fin around in these dense, syrupy waters. At 8 metres (25 feet), I sized up the best angle on a tall pillar of salt for a later dive, when I will come back with my camera. It’s just my luck that a drop of salty water seeped into my mask and into my left eye. An instant and horrible assault on the senses followed, like a hornet sting in the eye. I couldn’t open my eye or do anything underwater. I signalled to Avi, and we went back to the surface. After rinsing my eye thoroughly with fresh water, we returned to finish this first dive.
There are no fish – indeed we saw nothing alive – and the thick salt-dense water makes visibility poor. Field after field of creamy salt crystal formations appeared out of the gloom, sometimes like sand dunes, sometimes a monochrome, lunar landscape; sometimes looking oddly like bleached coral formations. Sometimes a sculpture – a salt cathedral would appear out of the gloom to break up the relief, bringing to mind the Genesis story of Lot and his wife Edith. She disobeyed the order to not look back, and turned into a pillar of salt. Sometimes walls of a canyon or a cave appeared. It’s an other-worldly underwater landscape and a unique experience.
After a dive or two in this unusual environment, you may feel you’ve pretty much seen it all. Avi disagrees, of course. He wouldn’t imagine not diving a whole week in the Dead Sea. There is a spot he told me about with a gigantic cave that you can only reach by boat. There is another site I can’t wait to dive, where fresh water seeps out of fissures in the ground into the sea so you can see patches of clear water squeezing through the thick salted water and escaping to the surface. There are more dives to do here.
Getting up and out of the water after the dive is no small feat. Releasable weights help, but I still needed help from a buddy to climb up the beach.
It was almost time to drive back, but decompression considerations are different here. At Dead Sea level, after surfacing you are effectively still diving at 3m (9 feet) below sea level. Dive computers must be configured to -3m （-9 feet） before the dive, and depending on the dive depth and time, you must wait up to 4 hours before taking the car back to sea level.
This gives plenty of time to rinse our gear — yet another interesting aspect to this experience. The greasy feeling water simply does not dry; it clings to the gear. You need to really have a good rinse with the fresh water you take with you as any of the hyper-salty water not rinsed away will cling to your gear for several weeks.
Before the climb back up to sea level and above, Avi set a table with some food. One of the plates was, he said, the only fish you can find in the Dead Sea – salted herring. The vegetarian in me declined. And besides, I’d had enough salt for one day.
