July 3 Jupiter Report

[z28badgirl]

As I am sure you know your bottom time is not a function of the amount of air you have in your tanks. Your bottom time is a function of the mix you are breathing and the depth at which you are diving. For safety most drift dives in the Jupiter area (reefs around 60 to 80 feet deep) for folks on air are limited to 25 minutes bottom time (computer or not) as you are most likely going to have a 1 hr SI (you will be waiting for the Nitrox divers to come up about 20 mins later and they will need about 30 mins to have a descent profile for the 2nd dive) and you will be doing a second dive. If you are diving tables, then you need to be aware of your max depth to determine your max no-deco bottom time.

Please do not base your bottom time on the amount of air you have in your tank. If you dive with a large 120 cf steel tank filled with air you will get yourself into deco if you wait for a specific remaining air pressure.

You may have enough air to get into deco, but you may not have enough to get out of deco - and without a computer in this situation you are likely to get bent.

Hope that helps??

We are, currently, using dive tables, so we follow that to get our max bottom times. I'm not sure if I understand what you mean by "bottom time is not a function of the amount of air you have in your tanks". What I think you mean is don't exceed the bottom time even if I still have plenty of air. Right?

Our dive instructors told us that when we get to a certain level of air left, then we head up. However, we never maxed out our bottom time (according to the tables) because we were all new and sucking air like fiends.