Most divers practice skills like buoyancy control and mask clearing in a swimming pool before their open-water checkout dives, but a new pool near Warsaw, Poland puts all other scuba training facilities to shame.
Named โDeepspot,โ the pool bottoms out at nearly 150 feet deep and holds over 2.1 million gallons of water. It is, in fact, the worldโs deepest swimming pool, and itโs complete with overhead environments, a small shipwreck and mock Mayan ruins for divers to explore and use for training.
Michal Braszczynski, director of Deepspot, tells the Agence France-Presse that in addition to recreational and technical diving, the pool "will also be used by the fire brigade and the army. There are many scenarios for training and we can also test different equipment."
The pool took more than two years and about $10.6 million to construct. Because Deepspot is technically a training center that offers courses, divers were allowed to test the waters in late November despite public pool closures across Poland due to COVID-19.
"There are no magnificent fish or coral reefs here so it is no substitute for the sea but it is definitely a good place to learn and to train in order to dive safely in open water," Przemyslaw Kacprzak, a 39-year-old diving instructor who visited the pool on opening day, tells AFP. "And it's fun! It's like a kindergarten for divers!"
Jerzy Nowacki participated in one of the first diver training classes to be conducted at Deepspot.
"For my first time, we went down five meters [about 16 feet], but you can see all the way to the bottom โ the wreck, the caves โ it's magnificent," he tells AFP.
Deepspot is about 12 feet deeper than the current Guinness World Record-holding pool, the Montegrotto Terme in Italy. Deepspotโs record may be quickly overtaken, as Britainโs Blue Abyss is slated to open in 2021 and will measure about 15 feet deeper than the newly opened Polish facility.