Rred
Contributor
"I don't understand why are people so afraid of doing simple deco dives, or refuse to do deco on air."
The answer is FUD. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Most often intentionally engendered by someone with an economic reason to create fearful illusions, like the dive industry.
Basic decompression diving is covered in the standard USN tables, and at least when I was certified, either you learned the tables and you learned how to calculate (or read) decompression times and stops, or YOU WEREN'T CERTIFIED. Period. No "advanced", no "tech", no "open water", you either were or weren't certified at all. It has been PADI's great contribution to the industry to break diving into bite-sized nuggets so many courses can be sold, with minimal learning in each one, to generate repeat business with 100% certification rates.
Now, if someone is doing advanced decompression, real technical diving that requires mixed gasses, gas changes, complicated timing beyond "my tank(s) will last this long, and I'll need a hang bottle at ## feet) that's something else again. That's getting into what we used to simply call technical diving, because it required special skills and precautions.
The hardest part of my first decompression dive? Was getting a waterproof dive time. The old Princeton Techtonics "stopwatch" was all we had before those great folks at Casio came long. (Unless of course you were Rolex rich.)
And the legal liability issues for businesses, charter operators, etc. are a totally separate issue.
Decompression? Heck, some folks can't read a gas gauge in their cars. Private pilots keep falling out of the sky, #1 cause of crashes turns out to be "ran out of fuel". DAN can't understand why the #1 cause of diver deaths still appears to be "ran out of air". For some folks...running the numbers for safe decompression diving is too complicated. OK, maybe they should have a "resort beach diver C card". (PADI sells that, right?(G)
The answer is FUD. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Most often intentionally engendered by someone with an economic reason to create fearful illusions, like the dive industry.
Basic decompression diving is covered in the standard USN tables, and at least when I was certified, either you learned the tables and you learned how to calculate (or read) decompression times and stops, or YOU WEREN'T CERTIFIED. Period. No "advanced", no "tech", no "open water", you either were or weren't certified at all. It has been PADI's great contribution to the industry to break diving into bite-sized nuggets so many courses can be sold, with minimal learning in each one, to generate repeat business with 100% certification rates.
Now, if someone is doing advanced decompression, real technical diving that requires mixed gasses, gas changes, complicated timing beyond "my tank(s) will last this long, and I'll need a hang bottle at ## feet) that's something else again. That's getting into what we used to simply call technical diving, because it required special skills and precautions.
The hardest part of my first decompression dive? Was getting a waterproof dive time. The old Princeton Techtonics "stopwatch" was all we had before those great folks at Casio came long. (Unless of course you were Rolex rich.)
And the legal liability issues for businesses, charter operators, etc. are a totally separate issue.
Decompression? Heck, some folks can't read a gas gauge in their cars. Private pilots keep falling out of the sky, #1 cause of crashes turns out to be "ran out of fuel". DAN can't understand why the #1 cause of diver deaths still appears to be "ran out of air". For some folks...running the numbers for safe decompression diving is too complicated. OK, maybe they should have a "resort beach diver C card". (PADI sells that, right?(G)