Diving to 200' and Beyond

[clownfishsydney]

68-70 yrs. of age(?) and she's filling her own mix, dubious backup gas and she emphasizes diving safely? Haven't seen it much in my experience. Oldest guy I saw in the US (NE) was a very fit cardiologist around 75-80 yrs. on air with old school equipment and technique. He didn't break 100'. The bit about this lady commenting on a nitrox as a "baby" dive smacks disingenuous + sooner or later it catches up with you. There are are "kooky" lucky legends diving out there. I try to stay away.

In Sydney I have a 78 year old who comes out diving on my boat twice a week weather permitting. We have another friend who is 81, has a pacemaker, still tows and launches his own boat and every week (again weather permitting), dives the deep wrecks which are 45 to 50 metres (150 to 165 feet). He uses a single 90 cf tank on a Nitrox mix (25% mostly) with a 30 litre pony bottle.

As to this woman, well, I doubt I would dive as deep as she says she does, but if she wants to do it, why not. She appears to know what she is doing.

 

[oya]

I take it all back. I guess it's OK because a bunch of people do it.

I'm so glad I'm not the scuba-police. I give up.

 

[Germie]

CMAS 3* means: dive to 60m/200ft on single tank. I have seen this too on the Togo Wreck. But the single tank divers do short bottomtimes.

60m is not that deep that it is directly dangerous. I do such dives on regularly base. BUT: I use trimix and decogases. There is always a risk with every dive, even if you are a really experienced diver, but with enough gas, right bottommixes and right decogases you make a dive much more save than doing it single tank on air.

I have done deep dives on air too. On 56m I saw double, so I was really, really narked. The narcoses of nitrogen is the first danger of diving deep on air like this woman does.
Then second: the amount of gas. A single tank is not a lot of gas, you cannot split it when having a problem like a twinset or sidemount.
Then third: no decogas.
Was she using a pony? Does that mean bottomgas or decogas? 60m on air (or trimix) means you are in deco (outside NDL) as soon as you are down there. Even if you do a bounce you will have to do some stops of a couple of minutes. I don't prefer to do deco on backgas.

The first step of safe diving: if you plan to dive in the nitrox region and want to have as much bottomtime as possible: take a nitrox. Then a big chance you are within NDL and don't need to do obligatory stops.
Outside the nitrox region: make a good diveplan with proper bottomgas and take a decogas.
And yes, decodiving means follow a course to learn the techniques. Just using a TTS of your computer is a bad idea.

 

[Bennno]

I guess it's OK because a bunch of people do it.

It's not Ok because a lot of people do it, it's Ok because you're overstating the danger and at the same time you are understating the danger of CCRs. OC can't just 'switch your light off'... CCRs have killed a ton of people considering the number of units sold. I don't understand how you can dispute that.

On 56m I saw double, so I was really, really narked.

Now that is stupid, once you feel narcosis kicking in you need to go up. Obviously you cannot react to anything once you're seeing double.

60m is not that deep that it is directly dangerous.

That I don't agree with either, 60m is very deep. You're a cave and tec isntructor? Didn't you just started diving less than 5 years ago?

 

[Peter69_56]

Now that's funny, I don't care who you are.

Larry

Nope its confusing, 40 m or 130' come on make up your metric/imperial mind for goodness sakes

 

[beester]

For the sake of debate, what methods would she have learned 'back in the day'?

We all appreciate that diving practices and equipment have evolved considerably over the decades. Far less of us truly appreciate the nuances of how things were done by those older generations. My own experience extends only to have avidly read Cousteau's books..

How would a diver, trained in the '50's or '60's, have been prepared for decompression diving at, or beyond, what is understood as contemporary extended ranges? What protocols, procedures and principles were followed by that 'pre-tech' generation?

As per the picture I posted a short while ago... what were the "safeguards and defences"; and what was the capacity for "the system to fail safely"?

As I understand it; the lady mentioned is either unsafe but incredibly lucky... or has a some workable approach that is so intrinsically different from modern, accepted practices that people fail to understand it. I'm interested to explore what that approach could be...and whether it really is safe, rather than lucky.

The "fail-saves" were easy -> SMALLER TANKS, with lower pressure ratings. I've been around divers my whole live. Like I said my uncle was a CMAS instructor (his instructor card signed by Cousteau). Since I was a toddler I was taken weekends to dive spots... And what I remember was:

- People dived long 12L (200bar pressure so filled to 180 bars) or double 10L tanks.
- Tanks were fitted with a J-bar (reserve which you had to pull when it became hard to breath... and phew for the unlucky one who had forgotten to pull back his reserve before filling the tank, because he would pull it and no reserve air).
- Regulators were unbalanced so you could feel pressure diminishing
- No manometers

This all combined ment that deep dives were by nature bounce dives. If they did shore dives (multilevel) they would use US navy tables and calculate deco on bottom time not avg depth (of the deeper part), so the dives were more conservative by this nature. Reserve held about 50 bars and was sufficient to get you up from 30m and do some shallow 6-3m deco. Square profiles I never saw in person (south of france), but they dove these 50-70m wrecks a lot with double 10s but I guess they limited bottom time.

A bit of an anecdote... but relevant. About 6 years ago I was eating in a harbor with my uncle and one of his old friends joined, after some chitchat the topic moved to summer holiday (both are pensioners my uncle at that time 61 and his friend 72). They've been going since the late 60's to Lavandou (FR) together even working for diveshops locally. So my uncle asks if they take all the dive gear (knowing his friend had had cardiac surgery 11 months ago) and his friend replies... yes of course we dive, but no longer deeper dives, after my bypass, let's keep it shallower than 60m. You can't learn old dogs new tricks.

 

[beester]

Now that is stupid, once you feel narcosis kicking in you need to go up. Obviously you cannot react to anything once you're seeing double.

With me at least that is the problem. Unless it's really a darc narc... most of the times narcosis sets in with me it's not really noticable. I'm not getting those cotton in your ear, nice and warm fuzzy tropical diving feeling. I just don't feel it unless it's a darc narc or I'm really overbreathing (CO² build up)... but I know it's there impacting my decision making (like the examples I gave).... and I only notice when I need to do something out of the ordinary.

So for me personally there is most of the time no "warning" telling me I'm narced, so I do not tend to go up As stated my personal experience. You could say, but you still dive to an END of 40m instead of 30m so you might be narced in that range as well. And yes that's true... there is a practical reason for this. I like NS wreck diving and most close by wrecks are in the 30-40m range, I love doing those and I believe (again very personal) that I have the diving "bandwith" build by experience at that depth range to be able to solve most issues.

YMMV.

 

[beester]

I wouldn't be so sure about that if I were you.


tl;dr CMAS 1* = max 20m, no deco
One Star Diver Training Programme


tl;dr CMAS 2* = max 40m, no deco. Further national restrictions may apply, e.g. our national flavor of CMAS 2* certifies you to max 30m.
Two Star Diver Training Programme


tl; dr CMAS 3* = max pPO2 of 1.4 bar (which is 56.7m or 186') and staged deco. Further national restrictions may apply, e.g. our national flavor of CMAS 3* certifies you to max 40m. However, the 3* cert is basically CMAS' version of PADI's divemaster, so it focuses more on dive leadership rather than on diving (deep).
Three Star Diver Training Programme

CMAS **** diver (at least in Belgium) max dive depth within certification on air 2.0 PPO² (just saying)... not that it's wise.

 

[Lorenzoid]

She is:
1) French
2) Certified under CMAS
3) Older

Because of those three things I don't think she is very extraordinary, she's more typical to me. Lot more people like her in the world than you'd suspect. In my experience - The French Dive Deep, especially someone who grew up in her time when diving deep was tremendously more common than today, especially since you is CMAS certified which includes deeper diving in it's normal certification.

I have heard similar stories about Italian divers. Still, being "older" or doing what "was tremendously more common than today"--that is, diving in accordance with outmoded training and mentality--may not answer the question, because the average advanced diver is not like her. More people are doing deep, technical dives than ever before, and they are being taught the modern way. I suspect you're correct that there are more divers like her than I suspect--older, French. But how many can there really be, out of the total number of French tech divers? I still am not persuaded that the kind of dive we are told she did in Curacao--150 or 200 feet with an 83 cf tank and a 40 cf tank, possibly on air--is "normal" even for an advanced French CMAS diver today. I still suspect that she is, as someone else put it many posts ago, a bit of a "dinosaur."

I don't think she regards herself as doing anything out of the ordinary for who she is and the diving experience she has. Barring a medical incident she likely has a lot of dives ahead of her.

You said this in reply to my comment in which I suspected her true motivation was more along the lines of "living to tell the tale" than what we are told she said: observing all that natural beauty down at 150 or 200 feet in Curacao. I wasn't referring to whether she thinks it's ordinary or not. I was referring to her motivations. And no, I am not saying her motivation is wrong--I'm saying her motivations look inconsistent with how she does the dives. If she really wants to observe all that beauty she apparently gushed to the OP about, why would she not do these dives in a way that lets her spend more than, what, 10 minutes or so, down at the depths at which everything is supposedly more beautiful.

She said the sponges were larger, the coral was "more magnificent", and "less ruined by pollution". She also said she saw marine animals not seen frequently in the "shallow" water (meaning anything less than 130'-150' ). Before my husband & I turned around, we looked down, & we could see the top of a wall below us (and the end of the reef we were swimming, which others told us begins at about 130-150' deep). She said the "most beautiful" part begins at the top of that wall & continues "even more so" as you drop down to over 200'.

It has occurred to me that some of what we're told she said is a little ambiguous or unclear. For instance, it's not clear to me what she does back home in France and what she does in Curacao. If she said "I dive trimix" when asked "what kind of gas do you dive," that doesn't necessarily mean she had trimix in that 83 cf tank for that 150-200 foot dive about which she gushed about all the natural beauty she observed. Maybe she was being evasive when asked for specifics. Maybe back in the Med she's diving double tanks with trimix, but in Curacao does these dives with an 83 and a 40 on air. Who really knows.

 

[Bob DBF]

- Tanks were fitted with a J-bar (reserve which you had to pull when it became hard to breath... and phew for the unlucky one who had forgotten to pull back his reserve before filling the tank, because he would pull it and no reserve air).
.

For historical accuracy only, a j-valve will not a tank to be filled if it is in the dive (reserve) position. The fill position allows the tank to be filled, when filled the J-valve is put in the dive position so that you will have a reserve, failure to do so will result in no reserve at the end of the dive, BTDT.

I'm saying her motivations look inconsistent with how she does the dives. If she really wants to observe all that beauty she apparently gushed to the OP about, why would she not do these dives in a way that lets her spend more than, what, 10 minutes or so, down at the depths at which everything is supposedly more beautiful.

Let's see, she is diving within the limits of her abilities, training,and equipment and you are suggesting for her to take more time at depth to make the dive valid for you. I suppose you encourage "trust me" dives as well so that divers can have a more valid experience.



Bob