Quickest path to deco diving?

[SlugLife]

Just grabbed my nitrox this week.

I did small commercial and small recovery for years. No idea on the dive count
Never logged a dive until my last vacation.
Going to be doing 2-4 a month for the rest of this year, so I want to work on the path.
Anything inside padi, or do I need to get into other organizations?

I tend to dive about 4x/month, and my dive-computer apparently has limited memory, and lost a bunch of dives. The dive-log computer's dive-log also appears to be missing a few dives; guess it's possible I did them without that dive-computer, but it's pretty rare I do less than 2-dives on any dive-day.

Anyway, when my AOW class required me insert a bunch of dives into the SSI dive-log, I ended up "estimating" my dive-lot for my advanced-open-water class. I also try to periodically export from my dive-computer for the next time I have to engage in more pointless tedious paper-work.

 

[SlugLife]

No, he's describing his own risk tolerance by making an analogy: some people dive to 150'/45m on air, he doesn't. Some people will drive after 3 or more beers, he won't.

While I consider myself well-qualified on beer drinking, I'm not sufficiently qualified on deep air to say whether @Lorenzoid's analogy holds up or not -- but that's how I read the post.

I was just curious.

I often wonder if a person is a frequent user of mind altering drugs (including alcohol) then they may have developed some psychological coping skills to really concentrate on the task at hand and may also be able to compensate more effectively to handle nitrogen narcosis - all things being equal.

My extremely high "tolerance" for alcohol may be why I no longer drink. My experience with being narcd is a little more limited.

What I would suggest for beginning to better understand this concept is to be very careful to not conflate seemingly related, but different concepts around impairment:

• Task performance. With training, practice, and experience, you may be able to perform many tasks, despite being severely impaired. The problem comes when thrown a curve-ball, like a regulator failure, or entanglement. Most fatal scuba accidents don't occur because of a single problem, but rather 2-3 problems at once.
• Judgement/Alertness. Even if one is able to perform tasks, narcd divers also do weird things at times, like continue to go deeper and deeper. or remove their regulators. With experience/practice, you can self-monitor to an extent, but it's unreliable. For example, you might know you're narcd/drunk, when 40% impaired, but at 80% feel perfectly fine because you're too impaired to notice or care. If you have strict discipline might stop at 30%, while your judgement is still intact. That said, most people have difficulty detecting how narcd they are in the moment (it's usually later in hindsight).
• Physical health/state. For example, a "high functioning" alcoholic might be able to write software, do math, etc, but their liver and health in general is getting wrecked. Similarly, there are physical dangers nitrogen and pressure, which have nothing to do with how you feel or function.

I would also say narcd and drunk are very different. My unprofessional opinion is that you absolutely can train yourself, to an extent, to better deal with impairments, including being narcd. However, there are very deadly risks involved with scuba, so any attempts to be a "functioning narcd diver" should only be done under very strict circumstances and in the pursuit of safety/training, and not because you're trying to push limits or save money.

 

[Celt]

After basic training the only thing you need to know is how to plan and make the dive you wish to do. Learning tricks like helicopter turns and hovering head down a foot of the bottom is not much use if the dive is in a river in near zero viz or a wreck in similar conditions. You learn by making the dives you wish to do. The more dives you make in various conditions the more you learn to handle those conditions. If the OP wishes to learn how to make dives involving decompression and a wreck, he has to go to wreck, drop a shot into it, go down and stay for the necessary time come back the line and stop for the necessary times and the dive is done. Everything after that he will learn making those dives slowly and controlled. You learn by making the dives you wish to do and could spend a lifetime doing tricks in a pool and learn nothing of what is needed.

 

[Wibble]

The point about learning, practicing and developing your core skills, such as helicopter turns and backfinning, is you’re in control. This becomes especially important when in difficult circumstances such as backing off from some bitey animal.

Of course you could do a dive with atrocious skills, kicking the crap out of the visibility, flora and fauna. Not nice.

 

[Celt]

The point about learning, practicing and developing your core skills, such as helicopter turns and backfinning, is you’re in control. This becomes especially important when in difficult circumstances such as backing off from some bitey animal.

Of course you could do a dive with atrocious skills, kicking the crap out of the visibility, flora and fauna. Not nice.

All the helicopter turns and backfinning in the world won't take you out of your comfort zone to make the dive you haven't made before. The whole problem handling an unknown dive is you're not in control and that's what you need to learn to deal with and learn to handle as it happens. Making a dive in a few hours in the Blackwater where I've never dived before and I have no idea what I'll come up against in 6 inches of vis. You can plan and lay lines and set it up as best you can but there's always the unknown. It's the same with any new wreck you don't know till you go there. I'd have to question the experience of someone who thinks there in control all the time.

 

[Wibble]

Being in crap vis is par for the course for many locations. Having skills you can rely on helps in that you've more options available. Around a wreck you may find yourself inadvertently penetrating (through that torpedo hole, unaware that you're inside because it's dark until you're surrounded by bent metal, then you can stop, reverse, turn around without further silting, follow back a bit, drop through the gap between the ribs, over the pile of twisted metal and out to the seabed -- last week on HMS Blackmorevale)

The core skills are essential for being able to deal with those predicaments. Not least for keeping the silting down for other divers, or think of the corals, etc.

 

[crofrog]

I'd have to question the experience of someone who thinks there in control all the time.

I question the wisdom of anyone advocating against fundamental skills before taking on greater risk.

Let’s define the word so we’re all on the same page, from the Oxford English Dictionary:

fundamental adjective
1. serious and very important; affecting the most central and important parts of something
SYNONYM basic
2. central; forming the necessary basis of something
SYNONYM essential
3. [only before noun] (physics) forming the source or base from which everything else is made; not able to be divided any further

Incidents are rarely a single cause but rather a series of small events that eventually compound to create serious or unsolvable problems.

Something as simple as momentarily loosing control of your buoyancy by a few feet while managing the smb can quickly result in an entanglement that results in you having to choose to cut away the smb, spend additional time at depth to sort it out, or continue to ascend while entangled. A single simple issue (momentary loss of bouyancy control), caused a more serious issue (entanglement) and has diminished your ability to handle the next potential problem.

 

[Celt]

Being in crap vis is par for the course for many locations. Having skills you can rely on helps in that you've more options available. Around a wreck you may find yourself inadvertently penetrating (through that torpedo hole, unaware that you're inside because it's dark until you're surrounded by bent metal, then you can stop, reverse, turn around without further silting, follow back a bit, drop through the gap between the ribs, over the pile of twisted metal and out to the seabed -- last week on HMS Blackmorevale)

The core skills are essential for being able to deal with those predicaments. Not least for keeping the silting down for other divers, or think of the corals, etc.

For crying out loud, use a safety reel if the vis is poor and there's any chance of straying into an overhead in a wreck. All the helicopter turns in the world won't help in a silt out.

 

[Celt]

I question the wisdom of anyone advocating against fundamental skills before taking on greater risk.

Let’s define the word so we’re all on the same page, from the Oxford English Dictionary:

fundamental adjective
1. serious and very important; affecting the most central and important parts of something
SYNONYM basic
2. central; forming the necessary basis of something
SYNONYM essential
3. [only before noun] (physics) forming the source or base from which everything else is made; not able to be divided any further

Incidents are rarely a single cause but rather a series of small events that eventually compound to create serious or unsolvable problems.

Something as simple as momentarily loosing control of your buoyancy by a few feet while managing the smb can quickly result in an entanglement that results in you having to choose to cut away the smb, spend additional time at depth to sort it out, or continue to ascend while entangled. A single simple issue (momentary loss of bouyancy control), caused a more serious issue (entanglement) and has diminished your ability to handle the next potential problem.

You have as much chance getting diving experience from the Oxford English Dictionary as doing tricks in a swimming pool.

 

[Wibble]

For crying out loud, use a safety reel if the vis is poor and there's any chance of straying into an overhead in a wreck. All the helicopter turns in the world won't help in a silt out.

Of course using a reel also needs decent core skills.