3 or 5 minute Safety Stop?

[Atom]

Then either the local divers are used to doing shore based dives where no 2nd dive exists, or where it is many hours of interval break from the first dive.....and they are used to diving so shallow that Nitrox is of no value....
Or, this is an area with a lot of cheapskates that would rather dive a little, cheaply......rather than a high volume of really awesome for the cost of Nitrox. Considering the high cost of living on Ca, this 2nd option makes no sense at all to me.
I am not really sure how things could possibly be SO VERY DIFFERENT between diving Catalina and diving Palm Beach and Lauderdale.

I'll always wonder about the people who drive 1h30 both ways to a boat, pay the charter fee to dive 90ft wrecks but won't pony up 10 extra dollars to get two nitrox fills and extend their dive time... but I've seen plenty of that.

I also wished EAN32 was as cheap here as it is in Florida But we don't have the volume of diver Florida has to drive the price down (heck there's some place with good diving where actually getting a fill of air is complicated).

 

[John_B]

Then either the local divers are used to doing shore based dives where no 2nd dive exists, or where it is many hours of interval break from the first dive.....and they are used to diving so shallow that Nitrox is of no value....
Or, this is an area with a lot of cheapskates that would rather dive a little, cheaply......rather than a high volume of really awesome for the cost of Nitrox. Considering the high cost of living on Ca, this 2nd option makes no sense at all to me.
I am not really sure how things could possibly be SO VERY DIFFERENT between diving Catalina and diving Palm Beach and Lauderdale.

Dan, are you familiar with the dive park at Casino Point? I'm a dyed-in-the-wool 32% kind of diver, but many of the dives in the dive park tend to be OW check out dives or the typical Basic Scuba skill building variety, shallow enough that they would be just fine with air fills. It's pretty common for those divers to get air fills from the fill trailer next to the dive park during the SI, especially since it's kind of a PITA to haul more than one tank over on the Catalina Express. And OW students have to dive air.

Nitrox is available on the island from Scuba Luv, though when we've done that we have had to rent their tanks, and enough tanks for the day which had to be schlepped to the dive park (and back).

There is also the Peace, which is an overnight dive boat out of the mainland with Nitrox; great for diving all over the Channel Islands, but not exactly a luxury accommodation. That's a far different beast from a day trip or overnighter to the dive park at Avalon for someone's open water check outs, though.

Edit to add: This would probably be a better discussion to have in the SoCal forum.