Burr Hole to Blue Hole: A Surgeon's Desert Diving
Posted By Charles Engles on 13 February 2006
Summer had come and gone, and I'd foregone diving for a conventional family vacation. Meaning, I hadn’t been in the water in over sixteen months, not since Cozumel in 2004. Although it was winter I schemed, and finally decided to look into a quick trip to Baja California for freediving with the Solomons outfit.
The website and photos looked appealing. The Solomons wrote articles for Deeper Blue and seemed to know what they were doing. They seemed to be reputable. I made inquiries, and Maria-Teresa made the unexpected suggestion that I consider freediving with Aharon Solomons in New Mexico rather than in their home waters of the Gulf of Baja. Instead of plane reservations for La Paz, I booked for the LaQuinta Inn in Santa Rosa, New Mexico.
After an exchange of views with Aharon, a plan was set. A middle-aged freediving duffer Oklahoma neurosurgeon would rendezvous with an Israeli international freediving expert in the small New Mexican town of Santa Rosa to freedive in an ancient freshwater spring, the Blue Hole.
I'd become a certified SCUBA diver at age 14 (in 1967) and have continued diving since then. In medical school I arranged for an elective in Diving and Hyperbaric Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. It was, of course, a thinly-veiled excuse to go diving.
After graduation, I joined the Undersea Medical Society, and following my residency in neurosurgery I finally became an accidental freediver in the Caymans in 1986. I'm aware of shallow water blackout and its physiology, but lacking a freediving buddy I've taught myself and dive alone. Beginning with the old SCUBA mask and fins and no real freediving resources, I slowly came round to a small mask and old ScubaPro Jet fins with dives to 60 feet. Tanya Streeter came into the picture during one such family vacation in the Caymans. Tanya was gracious and gave me a video of her record dive, which quickly made it apparent that there was a lot I didn’t know. A few years later, my daughters and I took a brief freediving course over a weekend with noticeable improvements in breath-holding times and depth. This led to a personal best of a 70-foot dive for 80 seconds in Bonaire.
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