Diving to 200' and Beyond

[Bennno]

I still am not persuaded that the kind of dive we are told she did in Curacao--150 or 200 feet with an 83 cf tank and a 40 cf tank, possibly on air

Ok ok, you got me, it's all made up... It's impossible to dive below 130' on air.

 

[Lorenzoid]

Let's see, she is diving within the limits of her abilities, training,and equipment and you are suggesting for her to take more time at depth to make the dive valid for you. I suppose you encourage "trust me" dives as well so that divers can have a more valid experience.

No, I am suggesting her statements might be inconsistent with her acts. As the story was related to us, she seemed to make quite a big deal about how beautiful everything was. Her description just doesn't strike me as what you would expect to hear from someone who is equipped only for relatively brief dives. I'm not saying it isn't possible for someone to be so keenly observant on a brief dive, but it does strike me as suspicious. Again, I suspect her motivation is not so much to observe the natural wonders as it is to brag or at least set some sort of personal depthachievement.

She said the sponges were larger, the coral was "more magnificent", and "less ruined by pollution". She also said she saw marine animals not seen frequently in the "shallow" water (meaning anything less than 130'-150' ). Before my husband & I turned around, we looked down, & we could see the top of a wall below us (and the end of the reef we were swimming, which others told us begins at about 130-150' deep). She said the "most beautiful" part begins at the top of that wall & continues "even more so" as you drop down to over 200'.

Ok ok, you got me, it's all made up... It's impossible to dive below 130' on air.

What? I did not say anything remotely along those lines. You cut off my quote. The full quote would be:

I still am not persuaded that the kind of dive we are told she did in Curacao--150 or 200 feet with an 83 cf tank and a 40 cf tank, possibly on air--is "normal" even for an advanced French CMAS diver today.

My comment related to my skepticism that she is typical of an advanced French CMAS diver today. Though I may indeed be (pleasantly) surprised at how many French dinosaurs remain, I think there are far more who dive in keeping with more contemporary safety margins.

 

[Lorenzoid]

deleted

 

[mmmbelows]

I still am not persuaded that the kind of dive we are told she did in Curacao--150 or 200 feet with an 83 cf tank and a 40 cf tank, possibly on air--is "normal" even for an advanced French CMAS diver today. I still suspect that she is, as someone else put it many posts ago, a bit of a "dinosaur."

With more diving in more locations with CMAS certified divers you'll probably change your mind about that as you discover who you label as a 'dinosaur' diver is a lot more common than you think, you've just not met many/any of them yet due to where you dive.

On Scubaboard everybody is the safest most knowledgeable diver in the world, nobody does anything out of the ordinary, everybody tips $20 a tank on every dive, however out in the real world there must not be any scubaboard divers diving because I witness the opposite of much of what gets presented here as 'normal' or paints other divers as 'dinosaurs'.

Just last year I dived with the male counter part to the female diver being discussed here in Rangiroa in French Polynesia. 12,000 dives on air at the Tiputa pass in his late 60s, dives just about every morning, along with this counter to the female diver we are discussing were lots of french CMAS divers there and they dive deep on air going into deco routinely, all I guess which would be in horror to the super community here on scubaboard, even though it's going on every day out in the real world where people are actually getting wet.

 

[Bennno]

@Lorenzoid
Look through the thread again, if I remember right, Jim, Pete, Sam, Andy, Beester, bamafan, Bob, dumsterdiver, oya and of bunch of other people dove deeper than 130' on air... do you think they all did it to brag? Pretty weak brag, IMHO. Maybe they did it for fun? All diving I do is for fun.
It's not recommended by most people and it's more risky but people still do it and they are not all dinosaurs... I'm 34.
Also, you might not realize that only ten years ago there were only very few places that had He or offered 'tec' training... maybe there were tec-shops in places like Florida but over here I never even heard of tec diving before the early 2000s.
I don't get why you still skeptical, 20 people basically told you the same story now, you just refused to believe it.
It this point, I don't think anyone can tell you anything about this that hasn't been said already.

 

[fsardone]

Just last year I dived with the male counter part to the female diver being discussed here in Rangiroa in French Polynesia. 12,000 dives on air at the Tiputa pass in his late 60s, dives just about every morning, along with this counter to the female diver we are discussing were lots of french CMAS divers there and they dive deep on air going into deco routinely, all I guess which would be in horror to the super community here on scubaboard, even though it's going on every day out in the real world where people are actually getting wet.

I guess he never had to work and has never been sick.
Assuming he started diving at age 10(!) it is 60 years ago meaning 200 dives per year not missing one ... either he is a pro or he was diving 4 times per weekend never missing one.
Sometimes the number of dives is a bit pampered for show.
Just a bit of skepticism .... and by the way a few years ago we dinosaurs did not log because there was no point in logging. I did start logging in the last 15-20 years (when I did get certified) but I have been diving for over 36, so I really do not know how many, and if I have to gues I would come up with a number higher than reality. Just saying

 

[Lorenzoid]

With more diving in more locations with CMAS certified divers you'll probably change your mind about that as you discover who you label as a 'dinosaur' diver is a lot more common than you think, you've just not met many/any of them yet due to where you dive. . . .

"A lot more common than you think"--I am certain you are right. But does that make them the "normal" advanced diver in their country? What if there are, just to pick a number, 1000 active "advanced" divers in France? When were most of them trained? Sure, some--more than I think--were trained decades ago, but most of them were trained more recently. How many of them dive the way we are told this woman dived in Curacao? How many are like this woman? A majority of the 1000? Really?

@Lorenzoid
Look through the thread again, if I remember right, Jim, Pete, Sam, Andy, Beester, bamafan, Bob, dumsterdiver, oya and of bunch of other people dove deeper than 130' on air... do you think they all did it to brag? . . . .

You do realize there is a LOT more to the original post and the follow-on information than "someone dived deeper than 130 feet (and it might have been air)." Yes, that alone is quite common. You seem to enjoy selectively reading bits of what I write, rather than the whole.

Let me try putting my thoughts about the original post another way:

If the original post had said nothing more than "I just returned from a dive trip, and one of the divers I met--older, apparently quite experienced, trained a long time ago--did some dives to 150 or 200 feet with an 83 cf tank and a 40 cf pony" then I think many of us would have reacted with a shrug, as in "so what?" We all know that decades ago diving was a sport for the intrepid, and some of the people who learned to dive back then are still actively diving, and still diving in a way that might be called "aggressive" by today's agency standards. We all know that even some people who were trained more recently do dives that they know are outside the envelope of what most agencies teach. Some of them are SB posters. If that had been all there was to the original post, I don't think so many people would have chimed in.

But there is much more to the original post. For one thing, there is a question posed to us: Is this a "normal" advanced diver in certain parts of the world? We are also told all kinds of interesting tidbits, from which some of us might have some fun making all kinds of inferences:

- she said she dives in the Mediterranean, where she lives on the sea
- some of her dives (in the Med or Curacao?--it wasn't clear) are to 250 or 270 feet "using trimix and a back-up pony bottle"
- she said she was the only woman certified at the time (if I understood that correctly)
- she said she "dives trimix" (on what dives and whether Curacao or the Med isn't clear)
- she refers patronizingly (or would that be paternalistically?) to a 100-foot dive as a "baby dive"
- she describes, in flowery language, her motivation for doing these dives as being: sponges larger, the coral 'more magnificent,' and 'less ruined by pollution, and marine animals not seen frequently at "shallow" depths
- she disparages today's technology and training: "gadgets are for those who don't know what they are doing," and dive training today is "too simple! Anyone could pass"
- she describes herself as a "caretaker" of the sea, in that she picks up debris when/where she finds it, and fans silt off the largest sponges as she swims by "so they can breathe."

As to the question that was asked, as I said above, I concluded from all of the information we have been given that "this intrepid and fascinating woman" is not representative of the "normal advanced diver" anywhere. I think she is, as the OP put it, the kind of person you see in documentaries. I could be wrong. It's just my opinion--my conclusion from the picture that has been painted for us.

One of the inferences I have drawn from all that together--and each of us is free to draw our own if we wish--is that she is quite full of herself, maybe narcissistic. I suspect she dives this way more to fuel her stories for divers she meets and keep the old practices going than what she purports to be her motivation. If she had said "I do these dives to challenge myself--like those competitive freedivers or like the people who summit mountains, and I know that what I do is considered risky by today's standards" then that would have sounded more sincere to me. Again, these are purely my own inferences, and I in no way care whether anyone feels the same way as I do. The OP didn't ask for our thoughts in this regard, but I and others have voiced some anyway.

I'm done with this thread. I have had fun with it, as others apparently have. I'm sure I'm not the only one who can almost hear this woman's voice in our heads and picture her telling her story. Again, if such a vivid picture had not been painted, I wouldn't have given it a second thought.

 

[fsardone]

@Lorenzoid
Look through the thread again, if I remember right, Jim, Pete, Sam, Andy, Beester, bamafan, Bob, dumsterdiver, oya and of bunch of other people dove deeper than 130' on air... do you think they all did it to brag? Pretty weak brag, IMHO. Maybe they did it for fun? All diving I do is for fun.
It's not recommended by most people and it's more risky but people still do it and they are not all dinosaurs... I'm 34.

Here I am tech deep air certified to 47 meters (there is also 54 and 63 meters levels) and ccr diluent air deco to 45 meters.
Now that I don't throw away helium by the cubic meter I dive an END of 30 meters but untill going the ccr route I was regularly diving wreck at 50 meters in air with deco in EAN50 and oxy 100%.
And it was (and still is) fun.

 

[Bennno]

@Lorenzoid
I don't want to argue over this, I read the same text but I think you are reading between the lines a bit too much... I don't even see how she was patronizing or full of herself, I don't see the part where she was using a pony on a trimix dive either. We also don't know how good her English is, the 'flowery' language might not even be intentional.

 

[Bob DBF]

@Lorenzoid
I hope one day to to be as knowledgeable and insightful about people I actually meet as you are about someone you have heard so little about second hand.


Bob