no but they had free nitrox there. A lot of the people on the boat would switch back and forth.
We need to take our nitrox coarse, because I don't know why you would switch?
On the South Side of Roatan, the use of nitrox is arguable either way.
Remember, nitrox is best used for repetitive and/or longer b.t. dives to moderate depths.
The South side of Roatan presents you with depths that are best kept above 75 feet. Because of the constant Sunlit exposure to the walls,
many divers look at 55' as their general depth limit, only occasionally blipping down deeper to see something a DM is excitedly pointing out. It is not uncommon to see an overall dive depth average out at 43 feet or so. Again- this is where the cool stuff is lurking on the South side.
If depth of diving and the consequent loading of Nitrogen is not an issue, you have to look at the BT, the bottom time or minutes that you are underwater. On one dive, as well as the subsequent dives.
If you are looking at five dives a day, which is easy to do from CCV, and a little more challenging from FIBR, that really starts to pile up. Your "
pixels••••••••on your dive computer start to hover in high
yellow near the
red zone towards the end of that fourth dive at 4pm.
By the time you've had dinner and get ready for an 8pm night dive, the "nitrogen loading graph" has backed down due to your off-gassing surface interval. So- if you were really staring at that computer,
and believed the high pixel depiction of your Nitrogen loading to be an indicator of being more prone to DCI at a given moment, that fourth dive (at 3pm) would be
the moment. Science has not proven this to be precisely the case, but I'm not going to argue with my computer.
I dive air on an air computer (on Roatan's South side). Rarely do my pixels get past middle yellow, but I have actually gone into deco at 4pm on the fourth dive~ once. {after 12 days of 5x a day, I owed 2 minutes at 25'}
In answer to your question, many divers will dive nitrox using air tables (computers) always aware of their Oxygen toxicity depth limit. It's
their safety margin. Very few will switch back and forth between nitrox and air, unless a dive profile pushes their decision. Some people just like the idea of diving nitrox (it makes them feel peppy or horny or _____ ), other people are just cheap and don't see the need for spending money to buy it if they don't need it.
If nitrox was free, that obviates the second possible reason. If they switched to air from nitrox on a repetetive dive because they wanted to exceed the Oxygen toxicity depth limit imposed by the use of nitrox- their heirs might be in for a real surprise. It depends upon their understanding of the mathematics.
I wouldn't recommend switching (or even using it), not in that localized environment of shallow diving.
