I thought that if your already out there (liveaboard?) you might dive in conditions that you would not normally and have conditions different than when you went in .. sorry
Ten Foot/3 Metre Stops in Heavy Swells?
- Thread starter Reg Braithwaite
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Huh? Are we still talking about the Internet here?
How long was your dive? Swells are driven by weather 1,000s of miles away. They take hours to days to establish and hours to days to break down. Day charter or liveaboard, both should have the wisdom to drop you at divable places, not where the swell will be dangerous on ascent. Granted if you do a mid-water drop and try to ascend up a wall or beach conditions can change, but you can partially mitigate those changes by moving back into deeper water.
SparticleBrane
Contributor
Conditions off the NC coast can change in a heartbeat...
Waves are not swells.
4 to 6ft waves ... 4 to 6ft swells ... does that make any real difference when your doing your last or safety stop?
How do you handle them differently?
How do you handle them differently?
Depends on the purpose of the model. If you're a boat on top of the water you really care about waves. If you are a diver 20 or 30ft down local wind waves aren't revelant, you care about the deeper swell which is a much larger portion of the water column moving up and down.
Here in Puget Sound proper we have wind waves and they can actually get pretty serious because given enough wind the short fetch creates steep waves close together. Sucks for boating but isn't all that relevant to divers doing deco.
In even larger bodies of water (but still non-ocean) you start getting seiches which are basically water piling up along a shore.
Lastly if you get a big enough body of water you can have locally calm conditions but huge breaking swells driven by distant weather. Google "Banzai Pipeline" in Hawaii and that's a breaking swell generated in Alaska that comes ashore there.
I see, waves may not disturb the water column for any depth .. but, your still having 6ft of water added to your depth, then taken away .. do you do a deeper stop?
Local wind waves will be so close together they aren't gonna be very relevant to a diver on deco.
A 4 to 6ft swell is fairly minor. Ask the skippers of the Monterey boats what the swells are on any given day and they'll help you get a better understanding. 10-12ft is still quite divable if they are slow and far enough apart. You just ride em up and down (underneath).
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