I will have to say, I've never read a long flaming post right to the end, but this one was funny as hell.
I love it when open water instructors started spewing about everything to do with diving when for the most part their experience is limited to, well, open water classes!
There is a young guy that dives locally who now has, Oooo..., wait for it, 200 dives and most of them are to...hold your breath...60 feet with open water students.
He is now "qualified" opinion on deep diving and all sorts of other stuff. Pretty interesting. You should hear him talk around divers. Bwhahaha...
Well, seeing as I dive with a death in a box (I think I shall now refer to it as DIAB), I better listen to what this open water instructor has to say. Especially when he says that trimix is even harder to monitor than nitrox. Hmm...I must not be reading my PO2 guages right. Because I stared at it really hard yesterday and couldn't find my trimix monitoring sensor.
During my dive partner's KISS class, there was a KISS student who had only just finished his OW class. So his 5th dive was on a rebreather. Ok, so he didn't know how to frog kick and his buoyancy was more than a little off, but he lived through it and I saw him on a wreck dive this year and he looked fine.
I think for SOME people, diving CCR can be done relatively easily. But probably much harder for others. But those "other" people are having a hard time sharpening pencil. So that's not really much of a benchmark.
My KISS instructor argues and CC is safer than OC because of the amount of time you have. Let's say you are trapped in a cave or wreck or even wrapped in fishing line. Time is not a concern because you have tons of gas! You can take all the time you need to untangle yourself or whatever. If you were diving OC, you had better and get your *** out of there. I pretty much agree with that.
So I would certainly encourage anyone who is interested in rebreathers to do some research in to what works best for you. A rebreather is not for everybody because of a multitude of issues. Cost, complexity, lack of dealers in your area, lack of dive buddies and (I think this last one is really important) if your dive area does not require it (by that I mean if your local consists of mostly very shallow reefs and nothing else AND OC air is VERY easy to get, then why not just stay OC).
However in the same breath (no pun intended) rebreathers are great because of a multitude of reasons, no bubbles, warm and moist breathing gas, better gas mixture, REALLY cheap to dive compared to OC cost in nitrox and trimix, lighter than a set of steel twins, much longer time available to you in the water....did I miss anything?
Cheers and fun diving to those who are diving DIAB.
