Eric Sedletzky
Contributor
What this is is just “flying your computer”. Many people do this these days. They give full trust to their DC to take care of them and ride the line without really giving much thought to what’s going on with gas reserve/depth/time. Computers have relieved a lot of the burden and trouble of having to think and pay attention to what’s going on, they do everything for you, probably way better and more accurately than you could do on your own. I suppose that could be a problem in the wrong hands; being used by people who have very little understanding of basic deco theory.I’m in this group you’re talking about. I have not taken a decompression course, I routinely exceed my computers decompression limits, and I do not calculate my remaining air. I would probably not behave this way if I was diving square profile tables!
It seems safe-ish though. When I hit deco at depth I start heading up, and the deco goes away as I do. I slowly ride my computers warning up to the surface, do my non-mandatory safety stop with 1000#, and it and I are both happy on the surface. If I misjudged things a bit I’ve had two or three minutes of real deco at 10’, but that’s more of an extended safety stop than an underwater emergency, right? I have never been close to a situation where I did not have enough gas to make it back up, even if I can’t quantify how close.
Safety is only one of the factors to be optimized here: I dive for fun and would be much safer just staying in bed all day. It’s my (limited!) understanding that spending most of the dive slowly ascending up a wall or wreck is easier on my body than a square up-and-down profile anyway. Diving like this allows me to cover a lot of different terrain, see a lot of different things, and decide what to do based on what I see down there rather than following a fixed plan. The fun / danger ratio seems high, even if I can’t quantify the fun either. Do I just not know what I don’t know? Are there things I haven’t considered? Would I learn those things in a deco course?
I can’t/won’t say it’s right or wrong, it seems to just be a sign of the times, people trust their lives more and more on machinery and devices.
Will it bite you in the ass someday? Maybe...If you’re going to trust your life on a device, at least make sure it’s a good one and learn how to use it well.