Instructors - days off?

[tep]

Out of curiosity - as instructors who might spend a lot of time under pressure, do you factor in rest days for additional off-gassing?

In other words, do many instructors spend enough time in the water that long term nitrogen (or oxygen) exposure is an issue? Enough that you'd want or need to take off 3-4 days in a row just due to DCS concerns?

 

[yle]

The last dive guide I spoke with in Cozumel told me that at the shop he currently worked for he gets one day off per week. At his previous shop he got zero days off. The rest of the days he was doing two to four dives each day, with each dive typically to a max of somewhere between 60 and 120 feet.

I would think that most days he would have around 18 hours between the end of one day's diving and the start of the next.

That kind of work / dive schedule may not be typical of other popular dive locales, but it does seem to illustrate that it can be done... i.e. dive every day without a day off.

If you're asking specifically about instructors teaching classes... typical open water students don't spend enough time or go deep enough for their open water dives to really cause a DCS concern for instructors. Other courses... definitely a different story. But an instructor would have to have a pretty heavy schedule of advanced diving courses to create a concern about DCS.

 

[Diver0001]

Out of curiosity - as instructors who might spend a lot of time under pressure, do you factor in rest days for additional off-gassing?

In other words, do many instructors spend enough time in the water that long term nitrogen (or oxygen) exposure is an issue? Enough that you'd want or need to take off 3-4 days in a row just due to DCS concerns?

You probably should. Personally I teach as a hobby so it's unusual for me to dive more than a few days in a row but I know a number of instructors, mostly from Egypt, who are making an average of 750 dives per year. Some are making more. One of the instructors at the shop where I work did 10,000 dives in 10 years, so that would be an average of 3 dives a day for 333 days a year.

I think one of the biggest concerns for divers who are diving this much are things like teaching the CESA or guiding beginners groups, particularly if they are not well taught, that c could make for heavy working dives and a lot of ascents. If I had to dive like that every day I'd be inclined to use Nitrox and put my computer on air just to create a safety buffer.

R..

 

[tbone1004]

Out of curiosity - as instructors who might spend a lot of time under pressure, do you factor in rest days for additional off-gassing?

In other words, do many instructors spend enough time in the water that long term nitrogen (or oxygen) exposure is an issue? Enough that you'd want or need to take off 3-4 days in a row just due to DCS concerns?

when we teach for about 2 weeks on end, typically 3 dives per day, and do that twice per year, we don't usually take "breaks". The tech instructors that I know that dive just about every day will not for DCS reasons. They might because they're exhausted or have something else to do, but they'll dive for well over a week on end, sometimes 2-3 without a break.

They key to doing that much teaching is no different than the key to being able to do a lot of recreational diving back to back is being deco certified. If you are deco certified, you can start doing your safety stops on O2 and that will purge a lot of nitrogen out of your system very quickly. Just the 5 minutes on O2 at the safety stops does wonders and if you have a computer that shows the tissue loading you can see it fall down pretty quick. The other thing you can do is to breathe O2 on the surface for 10-20 minutes at the end of the day which does the same thing for you.

The advantage in technical diving is you can set your GF-high for whatever you want and no matter how long the dive, no matter how many of them you've done, the computer won't let a compartment get above that number. The more deep dives you are doing, the more the slow tissues get loaded so the stops may be a bit longer, but you are coming out with no more than what you told that computer you wanted in each of your compartments.

What can be annoying for a lot of recreational instructors that don't have deco certs or access to O2 is when you have fresh students and all of a sudden you are limited by NDL because of the repetitive diving you have been doing. Even though you could keep up with a 5 minute mandatory backgas stop, you are now the limiting factor. The risk of doing this is for skills like the CESA, share air ascents, etc. though if you time that properly in your courses *if allowed, no idea what PADI has for their OWT layouts since I teach for NAUI which let's us organize it however we want*, it will be the first part of the first dive of the day, and you won't have NDL concerns

 

[HantsDiver]

If you're asking specifically about instructors teaching classes... typical open water students don't spend enough time or go deep enough for their open water dives to really cause a DCS concern for instructors. Other courses... definitely a different story. But an instructor would have to have a pretty heavy schedule of advanced diving courses to create a concern about DCS.

Open water is the course most likely to cause you DCS...

Multiple rapid CESA's are what get the instructors bent not the chilled out 30m hops on AOW.