Thanks for the comments, Glenn. I am glad you are in a great place for diving. I did have one very enjoyable day of diving in Puget Sound quite awhile ago.
I thought I would make a comment about the DAN article you mentioned, relating it to this thread. I have to go from distant memory, because I was in Florida when the issue came out and the magazine was lost in the forwarding process. I actually had to have someone tell me DAN's response-which is my point. I never responded to their response, and I will do it here.
DAN had an article labeled as guidelines for older divers. The author gave enough clues about his age (then 68) to tell me that we were almost exactly the same age. He said in deference to the limitations of his age, he never dived deeper than 80 feet, and he never stayed longer than 40 minutes. The story and the headline suggested that these were reasonable guidelines all of us senior divers should follow. IIRC, I had read the article in the evening after completing a dive to 270 feet, with a total time of about 2 hours. IIRC again, my letter to the editor asked what would have happened if I had written that article and suggested those limits for us seniors.
DAN's response to my letter was that we all have to use our own judgment as to what is best for us. Fine. My response to that now is that if we all have to make our own decisions on this, and if the judgment range is as far as those two dives, how can we call anything a guideline? The term is meaningless.
I think that is similar to some of what is going on in this thread. People are looking for precise guidance in areas in which no precise guidance is possible.
(BTW, I did dives to 196 feet and 208 feet this past weekend. In 10 days I will do 3 days of diving, with dives at roughly 215, 250, and 270 feet--not exactly sure yet. We septuagenarians have to keep at it.)
