Hi! Mu boyfriend and I were diving today in Grand Cayman. Easy dive at the Kittiwake only 60 ft. maximum depth total time was only 50 minutes. A multi level profile with a little bit of ascending and descending within the dive, but nothing extreme. At 30 minutes, a DS warning came on his Atomic Cobalt computer at only 46 feet, we ascended a little and it came on 4 more times within the next 5 minutes and the M-DS mode at only 32 feet and continued to flash DS again as we ascended to 25 feet. We completed a safety stop and when we surfaced the warning " Decompression Violation- Seek Aid" came upon the screen . This is a very unusual warning as this was not an unusually deep or abnormal profile. Anyone with a Cobalt had this warning before? Can we continue to use the computer or is it locked up for the next 24 hours? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Sorry, I've been off the board for a while, so I missed this.
It would certainly be possible to get into deco on a 60' dive if it were part of a repetitive series, particularly if you were multi-day diving. RGBM in general becomes more conservative in those situations, as it is trying to reduce bubble formation. Depending on your conservatism settings and saturation on beginning the dive, 50 minutes might well have gone into deco. What was the previous dive history? Was this with Air? With my settings a 60 ft air dive gives me only a 50 minute NDL with no prior dives.
The Cobalt will not lock you out, whatever you do. If you don't compete a deco schedule, it will continue to display a prominent warning for 24 hours, and require acknowledgement before diving again. But you can continue to use the computer- it's basically up to the diver to decide if the violation was severe enough to stop diving, but it is telling you it has been outside the realm of the algorithm.
He should have seen the No Deco time drop to zero, then an orange Deco Stop box come up displaying the required stop depth and time. If you then don't complete the stop, that counts as a violation. If you pass through the stop depth without making the stop, it will flash a "GO DOWN" message for one minute, then try to recalculate a new schedule, if possible. I'm guessing he would have had a short 20 ft stop?
If you look in the dive log at the dive, you can step through the profile and see the NDT at each segment. If you press the SELECT button the cursor will skip to any "event" in the dive, calculating a deco schedule being one- it will show up as "DS". Do you see this? If you want to send me detailed information on the profiles I can replicate it here, or if this doesn't seem to explain it let me know.
Ron
