deco stops, they were not, except for the mandatory stop at then end which can be seen in the picture I posted.
None of your stops were deco stops, the ‘mandatory’ stop was not a deco stop. If any were the DM5 picture would show another line representing your ceiling, ie the shallowest allowed depth. At all times on that profile you could return directly to the surface within the bounds of risk the computer finds acceptable.
Here on SB a lot of rubbish gets talked about how computers behave, people have favourites and some will complain about the behaviour of some brands. Part of that is this business about lockout on most computers.
It is quite hard to lockout a Suunto. You have to get into deco, which can be hard without running low on gas, not notice you are in deco, and then surface before the stop is done. That means you had to either be completely ignoring what is going on or had an actual deco stop longer than a typical safety stop. I have seen this happen once, actually a Cressi, due to a rapid ascent with deco owing while deploying a DSMB.
The wording of the manuals may be to blame.
There are deep stops, basically one or two minute Pyle style stops at half max depth or half the depth (not exactly but you get the idea) since the last one or so. These are optional but skipping them is recorded. If you get stops at 17m or 11m it is likely one of these.
There are real deco stops. This is when you have an actual limit on how shallow you can go without exceeding you nitrogen over pressure limits. They start at 3m and get deeper if you stay a long time. For example, after a 60m 25 minute dive a Zoop might have a ceiling of 7 to 9m. You MUST do these stops. The computer will explicitly tell you there is a CEIL. If you go above the ceiling you get an arrow pointing down. If more that for 3 minutes and it will go into error mode and just show depth and time. Note that the time to surface figure assumes you do stops at the ceiling depth. So if you have 10 minutes at 3m it will take longer at 6m. This is because your off gassing gradient is smaller and you get rid of the gas more slowly, not because dive computer programmers cannot count time.
Next there are so called ‘
mandatory safety stops’, these are usually an extra minute extending the regular 3 minute safety stop. These are
optional but if you ignore them the NDL on the next dive may be reduced slightly. You get these for ignoring deep stops, ascending too quickly, maybe having an excessively sawtooth profile. This vagueness is held up as a terrible thing by SB posters and reason to pay twice as much for a computer that ignores those things.
Then there are actual safety stops. 3 minutes if you go below 10m. These are optional too, but again if you ignore them your NDL on the next dive may be reduced. You SHOULD do safety stops as they are very effective.
Unless you have a ceiling indicated you are not in deco. When you go into deco Zoop and the like beep and tell you. Now you will have a time to surface displayed which looks like a big scary number but is actually 1 minute of deco stop, depth/10 minutes of ascent time (E.g. 3), possibly 1 minute of so called ‘mandatory’ stop, 3 minutes of safety stop and maybe a minute to surface, so 7 or 8 minutes. Usually people are slow at ascending and the actual stop has gone by the time they get to 6m.