Safety Stops

[Lost Yooper]

Greetings,

I'm not at all an expert on the subject, but have learned a bunch from the people at the WKPP and the GUE Quest list. From what I've gathered, decompression is still quite mysterious but the people of the WKPP are pushing things right to the limit and finding out that most of the current tables and thought processes are out of date. They are the guinea pigs of extreme decompression diving and are being closely watched by the Navy and commercial diving agencies. I can't begin to argue their point, but the reading is extrodinary.
I do deep stops for all my deeper dives, and I always feel much better afterwards compared to not doing them. It seems to make sense to me that a direct ascent from 150' to 20' is going to create problems. Richard Pyle has an interesting artical about deep stops and although the WKPP leaders certainly disagree with him on some points, the basic concept he writes about is very interesting.

Happy reading.

Mike

http://www.bishop.hawaii.org/bishop/treks/palautz97/deepstops.html

 

[neil]

Originally posted by TexasMike
I had always wondered why 3 minutes was the time versus 2, or 4, or 5.

As I understand it:
In the original tests done by Pilmanis, he found that a stop of 3-5 minutes between 10 and 30 feet reduced the number of asymptomatic bubbles by a significant amount. 3- 5 minutes probably because the experiments showed that that was the optimal time range for the desired effect: less time didn't reduce bubbling enough, and more time produced diminishing effects. Keep in mind that the safety stop as prescribed by DAN and the agencies is intended for "no decompression" diving as we know it. True deco diving is another matter. Those divers are performing stops REQUIRED by the mathematical model of their choice.

As far as trusting your Cobra; what really is the difference between trusting dive tables or a computer?(aside from mechanical failure), assuming you are following some sort of plan. You would have to determine that one mathematical model is better than another. You'd need to do quite a bit of research into the testing of the tables or computer algorithm being used (That's MATH!! Horrors!!).

Neil

 

[Tavi]

Dr. Deco and All,

Thanks for the replys,

Lost Yooper,

Thanks for the link. It's very interesting reading.I enjoy reading informative articles loaded with links to other articles.

Tavi:tree: