Decompression Stop Guidelines - What we have to do if got deco alert?

[Joneill]

-- or not: you did make a conscious decision to overstay the NDL, why be annoyed now?

FWIW when I'm chasing critters with the camera and then chasing the bubbles to re-join the group, rinse, lather, repeat, I usually don' t have enough air in Al80 to go into deco. Maybe on a liveaboard...

I meant if I exceeded my NDL because I was being careless and not paying proper attention to the NDL counting down.

If I intentionally exceeded it, I would not be annoyed. But with my experience and training, I should not be making a conscious decision to exceed my NDL.

Btw - the photographer I was taking about had done the 2 tank morning dive and it was on the first dive of the 2 tank afternoon trip that he went into deco - not that hard to do on the 3rd dive of the day if you don't watch your depth.

 

[Joneill]

Because, in hindsight, you might quantify your behaviour as irresponsible and pointing to a lack of discipline and self-control.

And/or that you recognise your decision to overstay your intended no-stop time as evidence of an insidious creep into complacency, that you got arrogant.. and it constitutes an abandonment of the safe diving principles that you know and understood will help preserve your safety.

Or maybe angry with yourself that you ran your dive with less control and weaker procedures than might be expected of a newly graduated open water student...

Exactly!

 

[The Chairman]

Unplanned deco constitutes an emergency because you have not ensured (planned) adequate gas to complete that deco.

Malarky. OK, I'm diving a Suunto on my left arm and an Oceanic (Pelagic) on the other. According to this faulty way of looking at it, my left arm is in an emergency state while my right arm has minutes left before it's in an emergency situation. The NDL is not a line where you are safe on one side and in mortal peril on the other.

An emergency exists only when life and limb are in peril. Going into five minutes of unplanned deco is not an emergency in and of itself. There is no guarantee that you're going to be bent if you ascend, and you probably have enough gas to do your deco if you're starting up with 500 psi in your tank. Hell, I know of a woman who brought in her brand new PDC to a dive shop because it wouldn't stop beeping during her dive. It HAD to be defective. They hooked it up to a PC to check her profile. That beeping showed that she blew off almost 20 minutes of deco. Yet, she never showed any signs of DCS. The converse is also true. You can be within your NDL and still get bent.

So let's save "emergency" for real emergencies.

 

[Lorenzoid]

In an OW course (Pete's?) in which it is patiently explained to the student what it really means for any given computer to "go into deco," the term "emergency deco" might be alarmist. But what about all those OW students who don't have the benefit of exceptional instruction like that? The masses who are taught "DON'T EXCEED THE NDL (and I don't have the time to teach you the concept of the fuzzy gray area, measuring with micrometers and cutting with axes, and all that)." Some have said that PADI has the best written materials of any agency, and if that's true, PADI probably gave it some thought before choosing the term "emergency deco." Maybe it's better for the masses to err on the side of sounding alarmist. Exceptional instructors remain free to explain that "emergency" is a bit alarmist and that panicking over a computer going into deco is the worst thing you can do.

 

[boulderjohn]

FYI, although I don't by any means know the majority of recreational dive computers out there, at least some of them use the term "emergency decompression" to describe the process in their instruction manuals.

 

[The Chairman]

Thanks @Lorenzoid for the more than kind words. I hope to live up to them one day!

I guess I should point out that I'm not a PADI instructor. I don't and won't use PADI vernacular as it departs from my or my agency's vernacular. If you take OW from me, it will be through NASE for several reasons. I see many classes where the students seem to be in constant white knuckle mode. Why??? Fear detracts from learning. I believe that PADI doesn't allow their instructors to suggest that their students may die from doing certain things, which would suggest that they aren't that into being overly alarmist.

The masses who are taught "DON'T EXCEED THE NDL

My OW students are taught that very same thing. There's simply no need to go into accidental deco, run your butt out of air, lose your buddy, kick the crap out of the reef, not be able to hold your safety stop and I could go on and on. I also teach the strategies to recover from each of those and that's what I didn't see in the OP. It was very dramatic with a horrible strategy if you accidentally go into deco and they left out what to do if you blow off deco. It's like Chicken Little running around screaming the sky is falling, and not giving you a solution to prevent your imminent demise. In that regard, it smacked of a recent Presidential Race and no Scuba Instruction should ever remind you of a Presidential Race.

So ratchet down on the alarmism and give a better idea on the strategies needed to resolve the issue.

 

[teknitroxdiver]

It's a bit irritating that this account and at least one other seem to exist for the sole purpose of dumping posts that are very simplistic, poorly written, or flat-out wrong, and include of course many links to their own blogs. And the two that I'm thinking of almost never return to a thread to engage in the ensuing discussion. Simply dump and run and wait for the blog clicks.

 

[AlexL]

Simply dump and run and wait for the blog clicks.

shilling is big business; pay your money, get your traffic and clicks... nevermind that a very large portion of ad click revenue is completely and utterly fraudulent. its nothing new, you should see the things less then honest marketing and advertising companies pull to boost that all so important google ranking. rage quit more then one of those shops over the years as a sysadmin because of shady business practices.

what always gets me is the 'prim and proper' wording in the initial post with an obvious lack of deep understanding of the topic at hand, and then the 'country yokel' wording in any followups... brah. copy is cheap, knowledge is not.

 

[kelemvor]

The term smacks of hysteria like Reefer Madness. Is it an emergency if you skip deco? Only if you get bent.

Pshh.. Obviously, you've never met a reefer in person.

 

[The Chairman]

It's a bit irritating that this account and at least one other seem to exist for the sole purpose of dumping posts that are very simplistic, poorly written, or flat-out wrong, and include of course many links to their own blogs.

So? Lots of shops and divers promote themselves on ScubaBoard. I'm way OK with that. My problem isn't with them using us to promote themselves. It's with the incomplete as well as alarmist verbiage they used. No, we won't accommodate non-scuba attempts to do the same, I guess because we're so biased. But look at the discussion it has engendered. I think it's good overall.