Awap, Adelman, Suprane...thanks for those comments...clearly you three know way more than I will ever know about how nitrox is conjured up....
and now I feel more squeamish than ever about the common practice in Coz for nitrox divers to dive without testing their tank. I saw that done more on my last trip there than I have seem cumulatively on all my trips to date. It was the exception rather than the rule, when I saw someone other than myself insist on testing their mix before jumping in. But I digress. Keep discussing, I am learning alot from you.
Anyone, and I mean ANYONE, who dives Nitrox without first analyzing their tank to KNOW what it actually contains, is simply playing Russian Roulette! You may get by with it often, but eventually (if you do it often enough) you will get hurt if not killed! As DandyDon says:
"You wouldn't think of diving Nitrox without analyzing the O2 content first; why would you trust your life to CO analysis that may have been completed three months ago - IF THEY EVEN DO THAT?! The time, effort, and cost to check each and every cylinder of gas you dive for carbon monoxide is negligible, especially when considering the dire outcome of contaminated dive gas."
I will admit that it is probably much more common to get a mis-mixed bottle of Nitrox than it is to get a CO contaminated bottle of air. But, I think the later is probably getting more common. Part of this may be due to the rapidly exploding numbers of people entering diving. This results in greatly increased strain on the existing compressors and a lot of operators trying to minimixe their overhead costs by pushing their compressors harder than they should and cutting corners on their facilities, training, and safety considerations. The other thing is that in times past there was not the global access to information that there is now... There wasn't the internet and sites like ScubaBoard. And so when incidents like this occurred (and trust me, they did!)they were quickly swept under the rug and the public in general NEVER had any knowledge of the occurence!... Would you have known about this if you were not a member of this site?..... I think not. And if you were to position yourself outside of Palancar Divers tomorrow and ask everyone about to go inside if they were aware of this incident, sadly, I bet you would not find a single person who has heard of it!
CO analyzers have just recently really become reliable enough, accurate enough (measuring low enough levels of CO), and reasonably priced to the point where they are a viable consideration for serious divers. Still relatively expensive, I think the price will continue to fall and they will become more "diver friendly" as time goes on!
As far as your comment about not knowing as much as some of the rest of us..... I still have LOTS to learn!... The courses are out there and I encourage you to keep learning and refining your skills. You can quickly become (with the right training) the kind of diver that the "newbies" on the boat look up to and think, "Man I wish I was that good!"... NEVER STOP LEARNING!
