If you'll be back a year later with a CCR anyway, sure, why not skip a 62m dive on air? Think about the many beautiful wrecks you still want to see, and that one serious accident will end your diving career. Particularly if you love wreck diving and want to continue doing it a lot, you would rationally prefer to err on the side of caution to maximize your diving experience.
An age-old question: ways to 60m.
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If you'll be back a year later with a CCR anyway, sure, why not skip a 62m dive on air? Think about the many beautiful wrecks you still want to see, and that one serious accident will end your diving career. Particularly if you love wreck diving and want to continue doing it a lot, you would rationally prefer to err on the side of caution to maximize your diving experience.
David Carron
Contributor
GUE had training courses for ocean diving from the start. Jarrod Jablonski founded GUE partly because the idiots running some other "technical" training agencies thought that taking students to 190 ft / 57 m was an acceptable practice.
Twenty-five Years in the Pursuit of Excellence – The Evolution and Future of GUE
Founder and president Jarrod Jablonski describes his more than a quarter of a century long quest to promote excellence in technical diving.indepthmag.com
Honestly, there are enough sites at depths well below the common "rec" range but regularly dived on air that blanket descriptions like "stupid" or "idiots" smack more of parochialism than anything else and really don't seem very helpful.
This is a bad example. Helium is very easily available at all shops that organize dives on MT Haven.
PfcAJ
Contributor
Re: helium availability, I just got back from an expedition in Africa. We (as a team) set a limit on our depth and deco times because we hadn’t arranged for He or o2 other than emergency surface oxygen. Had we found objectives that went deep, we already decided that they weren’t on the table for this trip. We (potentially) dumped a ton of cash to go on this trip, and could have ran into immediate depth roadblocks.
If you’re doing expedition tech diving, you don’t need to compromise safety in an already high-risk environment. You’re remote with limited resources, and diving deep or with long decos without the right gases makes things worse.
Could we get it? It wasn’t “available” but I’m absolutely certain that it could be made available through the power of Visa or Mastercard. That’s really what it always comes down to is money. Sucks, but it’s the way it is if you’re in places that don’t have tech diving infrastructure. You have to build it yourself or be smart and don’t do those dives without the right gas /equipment/ whatever.
Sometimes we just can’t afford what we want to do. It be like that. But you can still make good decisions and have a good time without subjecting yourself to pointless risk.
If you’re doing expedition tech diving, you don’t need to compromise safety in an already high-risk environment. You’re remote with limited resources, and diving deep or with long decos without the right gases makes things worse.
Could we get it? It wasn’t “available” but I’m absolutely certain that it could be made available through the power of Visa or Mastercard. That’s really what it always comes down to is money. Sucks, but it’s the way it is if you’re in places that don’t have tech diving infrastructure. You have to build it yourself or be smart and don’t do those dives without the right gas /equipment/ whatever.
Sometimes we just can’t afford what we want to do. It be like that. But you can still make good decisions and have a good time without subjecting yourself to pointless risk.
Sorry, this is a long thread, so I didn't get to read the entire thing, but I'll add my own anecdote.
I've done ~50m on EAN24 (as do many people I know) and I can tell you that they all went well, except for one. I'm not proud to tell this story, but it was a wakeup call for me and I hope it helps others make the correct decision.
This day I got poor sleep, and probably had many other contributing factors (maybe I just had bad gas? I don't know)... but when I was at that depth I felt like I was hallucinating (felt like I was in a cartoon or something). I was aware enough and my training kicked in, but I really had to think and be deliberate about every move. The earlier example that @PfcAJ gave about drunk driving is spot on. Most of the time nothing happens and we don't get caught or have an incident, but the risks go up exponentially, especially if something happens.
Am I going to sit around and preach to others what to do? Nope, you do you.. it's your life. However, to advocate to others, something which knowingly increases risks, does seem pretty irresponsible. Especially considering we don't know their physiology, environmental factors, etc.
I've since done that dive multiple times on EAN24 without issue, but that incident is also one of the reasons I went CCR/Trimix route. Plenty of people have done deep air, especially 30+ years ago, before Trimix/technical diving was a thing, but there were also plenty of incidents. Now that we know much more, it's good to give ourselves a margin of error, if possible.
Kay Dee
Contributor
*Besides, who knew at the time we would be back a year later? Not me. And as at the time I had been doing 60m air dives when necessary for the previous 15 years (along with mixed gas dives and SCR & CCR dives), and had the training / experience to do so, why not do it (in reply to your "why not skip a 62m dive on air"?) given there was no helium available.
I could be wrong but, given you above statements, I get the impression you may not have had the good fortune to be involved in the search for and discovery of virgin (historically important) wrecks? If on the other hand you are, then I am very surprised you are asking the question / making the suggestions you did.
*LATER EDIT: And besides, your suggestion of "why not come back next year" may mean where we were in Asian waters that you come back next year and the wreck is gone! Yes, large warships completely gone as has happened (and is happening) throughout Asia in more recent years (courtesy of illegal Chinese commercial salvagers).
Find a Dive Center that has rental rebreathers and do a course. Rent the unit until you are ready to commit. Maybe even try a few different rebreathers. Some people find rebreather diving is not for them others get hooked straight away and realise it is the only way forward for deep diving.
Tech Instructor Trainer | Rebreather Instructor Trainer
techdiveasia.com
Tech Instructor Trainer | Rebreather Instructor Trainer
techdiveasia.com
Kay Dee
Contributor
And there still seems to be, if not "plenty of incidents", then certainly 'enough' today on CCR. Just saying.
What’s funny with all this, well not funny but laughable, is that you would think that before helium came along and became ‘widely’ accepted / used among ‘sport’ (dislike that word in the diving context) divers, that nothing deeper than the 40m Padi limit got dived / accomplished on air. I wonder what the northeast boys on the Doria, and the guys on the deeper south Florida wrecks, the early days in Asian waters and the South Pacific, and other locations around the world would think of that? Sure there were accidents / deaths even. And sure it’s ‘better’ / generally safer on gas but..……………………... pray tell, aren't we seeing a fair share of deaths on CCR, and much of that while using helium to boot. But oh no, some of the folks here would have you believe that it’s that deep air stuff that’s gonna kill ya.
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