Deep Air - Here we go again....

[DCBC]

or what? You will beat him up?

No Jeff; your still here being obnoxious aren't you?

 

[Rainer]

The only obnoxious one is he who keeps prattling on about how macho he is diving deep air. You're a bad joke.

That you actually teach, however, is quite sad...

No Jeff; your still here being obnoxious aren't you?

 

[JeffG]

No Jeff; your still here being obnoxious aren't you?

obnoxious?? I can see where you would get that from your point of view.

Because what I describe, you cannot see or comprehend.

Your ego gets in the way.

So you see it as obnoxious.

I think that is amusing.

 

[PfcAJ]

Don't suppose to say you know me. You don't. If you did, you wouldn't be so fast to shoot off your mouth.



Since you've used the drinking analogy, it would seem that if you hear about a person who dies of alcohol poisoning, you think drinking should be outlawed because we now all know better. That just doesn't make sense. You teach people to drink responsibly not abstain.

Blame it on something else???? What are you talking about? Practically speaking, no one dies from breathing air. They breathe air past their safe PPN2 envelope, lose control and drown. Air is not the problem, nor is alcohol. It's the improper application of it.



Yes, I'm sick of reading about deaths in cave diving, this stupidity has to stop.
I'm sick of reading about deaths in ice diving, this stupidity has to stop.
I'm sick of reading about deaths in decompression diving, this stupidity has to stop.
I could go on, but it's not the activity; it's a dangerous environment and people make mistakes. Training and proper preparation mitigate diving accidents.

I suppose we should offer "drunk driving courses." Driving with a BAC above the legal limit is the same as diving beyond 100ft without helium. People do it, so it must be ok! Stupidity beyond the pale.

James JUST posted a list of some 60 people who died from it. Oh wait, you'd say they died from drowning, and that no one dies from alcohol in drunk driving accidents, they die from trauma. Dumb.

 

[Sloth]

You appear to have a ton of in water experience. Unfortunately old school experience isnt that impressive to modern tech divers who as a whole are overly cautious and completely non-mucho. A few things have changed since 1984

 

[rjack321]

Has the atmosphere changed? Didn't we just hash this out to a stalemate last month?

I guess things won't really change until the old guard retire or are killed off by their own foolish practices. Funny thing is that while they love extoling the virtues of adv nitrox & deco courses on air to 160+ft when it comes to their own trimix diving the chose more modest ENDs.

 

[PfcAJ]

Yea, it had been a month of quite and everyone got restless, so we made another deep air debate. What better way to spend a rainy Tuesday afternoon?

 

[Blackwood]

This seems that this is a reoccurring thread. I've started this thread to continue a discussion that was hijacking another. In summary, my position is that:

1. While breathing air at a depth of 50', a diver's performance and reaction time is lowered. Even so, the majority of us dive air at this depth safely.
2. Each individual possesses a different depth envelope to safely dive air.
3. Divers can be trained to expand upon this safety envelope with training. Deep air courses are designed for this reason.
4. Experience has a tendency to expand the individual's deep air envelope.
5. At some point, a diver wanting to dive deeper changes his breathing mixture to Trimix or Heliox. Ideally, these gases are available at the dive site at a price affordable to the diver. In locations where they are not, deep air training may be beneficial.
6. The use of Trimix now allows divers with as little as 100 hours u/w to be certified to depths of 300'. Although narcosis isn't an issue, I personally see a problem in certifying a diver to go deeper than his experience dictates.
7. Deep air seems to be the VooDoo gas that Helium was once identified as.
Comments?

1 & 2 - agreed.
3 & 4 - I've never done deep air training, so I can't comment.
5 - yes, though I've never had helium available at any dive site. Most of the time, I bring all my gas with me.
6 - technically, there are some standards that allow for it. Whether many divers with no more than 100 dives could meet the performance standards is another question.
7 - not really. My understanding is that helium was "voodoo" because people didn't understand it.





It seems to me that everyone (even those who are 'proponents' of 'deep air') recognizes that there is a narcotic safety envelope beyond which using helium is advisable. The discord revolves around where that 'limit' is. And, like everything else, it's different from one person to the next.

For you, that's >250 feet (trying to remember a few deep air threads back, so I may be off). For someone else it may be >80 feet.


The discussion often involves your observation that one or more training agencies allow a diver with 100 dives to enter an advanced trimix program (which doesn't mean an unqualified diver will pass the course, but that's a side note). As JeffG mentioned, that complaint is best directed towards the training agency. It doesn't, however, support an argument for "deep air".

 

[Blackwood]

Has the atmosphere changed? Didn't we just hash this out to a stalemate last month?

I guess things won't really change until the old guard retire or are killed off by their own foolish practices. Funny thing is that while they love extoling the virtues of adv nitrox & deco courses on air to 160+ft when it comes to their own trimix diving the chose more modest ENDs.

It's 2010. We have a whole year of Deep Air threads to look forward to.

 

[muddiver]

Oh, I love the black suited DIR/Tech Diver statements that "If you don't dive on Tri Mix your stupid".

And you wonder why you all get such a bad rap from the rest of the scuba community.