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I believe it's either 18 or 22' where you could stay down forever air permitting and ascend directly with no safety/deco stop.
When to do a safety stop?
- Thread starter OnTheMark
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Presumably you like to dive.
If you and your buddy properly managed your gas and got back to 15-20 feet with no emergencies, you have plenty of air to continue having fun in the water using a tank that's already going back to the shop for a refill. Why would you not?
It's three more minutes in the water during which you can relax, enjoy the view, fine tune your buoyancy, practice blowing air rings, make up silly hand signals with your buddy, run through skills, try to kick backwards in a circle, or make sure any gear you used is properly secured.
I always do a safety stop unless there's a articulable reason not to (e.g., my buddy was cold and preventing imminent hypothermia seemed more important than mitigating an already-negligible DCS risk after a nowhere-near-NDL dive).
The alternative is to whine, "Gee! Do I really have to endure three more minutes of being under water?"
P.S. What other people got away with has nothing to do with your decision to dive prudently. The surest way to become an unsafe diver is to internalize other people's stories about deviations from standards that didn't kill them.
If you and your buddy properly managed your gas and got back to 15-20 feet with no emergencies, you have plenty of air to continue having fun in the water using a tank that's already going back to the shop for a refill. Why would you not?
It's three more minutes in the water during which you can relax, enjoy the view, fine tune your buoyancy, practice blowing air rings, make up silly hand signals with your buddy, run through skills, try to kick backwards in a circle, or make sure any gear you used is properly secured.
I always do a safety stop unless there's a articulable reason not to (e.g., my buddy was cold and preventing imminent hypothermia seemed more important than mitigating an already-negligible DCS risk after a nowhere-near-NDL dive).
The alternative is to whine, "Gee! Do I really have to endure three more minutes of being under water?"
P.S. What other people got away with has nothing to do with your decision to dive prudently. The surest way to become an unsafe diver is to internalize other people's stories about deviations from standards that didn't kill them.
Agreed, with a gradual shore dive coming back along the bottom is the best approach. But for me it’s the 20 foot depth to the surface that’s the danger zone and good control in this water column is vital. I’d worry more about the speed of my assent for the last 20 feet than doing a stop.
seeker242
Contributor
Always doing a saftey stop is never ridiculous because even if it's not actually needed or does not increase saftey, it's always a good opportunity to practice and refine your buoyancy control.
I like both these statements. If I'm diving I'm there to be wet. I like to squeeze all I can out of being under water. Usually I'm in the shallows with the blue gills when it's time to come up...and then it's a 10 or 15 min SS depending on air left. The safer I am I figure the more diving I get to do in my life.
Most older more experienced divers that I've talked to lean towards being safer and more conservative. A extra few minutes under to clean up or adding a few to a SS is well worth skipping a ride to the chamber...that's not an experience I want. Could I skip the SS? Sure. .....Should I? Do I want to ride the line just to see how far I can go and how close I can get to the edge? And even with that said, just because today I'm fine doesn't mean tomorrow will work the same outcome. It seems to me the great divers are the ones that start to take steps back from the edge, not closer to it.
Tbh, the more conscious I am of my accent the better I feel physically after the dive. The accent is probably the most important part of a dive and I don't think OW is taught in a way that's conducive to get a grasp on what's really going on. They say "stay in this box above NDL and you'll be 100% safe...disclaimer at the bottom says (****more or less)" "dive, ascend, hit the brakes @ 15' for 3 min and you "should, pretty much, for the most part be good" ...but that's not really the whole picture.
The best question (to me) would be "What is a safety stop and why do we do them".
edit: typing errors, my fingers suck at it
Tom_Subsurface
Registered
Trying to through my 2 cents in English...
Without having read all previous 3.x pages of the thread...
Maybe if you look back to where the safety stopp comes from helps understand. Correct is what was written in previous answers: You want to give you compartments time to off-gas while the environmental pressure drops dramtatically while going up from 30' to surface.
Result: The pressure in your tissues goes up dramatically (compared to environment) and may lead to bubble formation. This all depends on your hydration, age, physical state, and your personal likelihood of forming bubbles (also described as personal susceptibility) and tons of more factors. F.e. there are so called 'bubblers' amongst us that after almost every dive have bubble formation in their tissues. But how do you know if you are one of them...? Normally you don't.
Anyhow. The 3 mins @5meters or 3mins @15feet or whatever Padi/SSI/CMAS/.... taught you orginally comes from an original recommendation to ascend from 30' to surface continuously and slowly over 5-7 minutes.
Diving associations might have found that a too difficult instruction for the average stupid diver and created the 5mins @X feet rule.
Now, whatever your dive was like and how deep it was, just make sure to go up super slowly once shallower than 30 feet.
NEVER go down again after a deco stop or a shallow dive to obey the safety stop rule. Rather continue a super slow ascent from where you are or just sit a few more minutes between where you are and the surface to help tissues reduce the pressure gradient that they built up during depth.
AND: Please regard the safety stop as a MUST-DO stop unless you have really urgent reasons to skip it. Keep in mind that according to various literature dive computers still accept a probability of DCS ranging between 2 and 5% percent with a probability of DCS2 (neurological) of 0.2-0.5%.
Btw... German CMAS federation "VDST" is recommending to ascent 3 feet per minute after safety stop until you surface.
Now think about walking 15 feet within 5 minutes... that is super slow! Don't want to discuss if that recommendation is a bit over the top... But what I am saying is that one of the largest CMAS federations is recommending to surface even slower than any previous recommendation and I am pretty sure they're doing this for a reason.
Cheers
Without having read all previous 3.x pages of the thread...
Maybe if you look back to where the safety stopp comes from helps understand. Correct is what was written in previous answers: You want to give you compartments time to off-gas while the environmental pressure drops dramtatically while going up from 30' to surface.
Result: The pressure in your tissues goes up dramatically (compared to environment) and may lead to bubble formation. This all depends on your hydration, age, physical state, and your personal likelihood of forming bubbles (also described as personal susceptibility) and tons of more factors. F.e. there are so called 'bubblers' amongst us that after almost every dive have bubble formation in their tissues. But how do you know if you are one of them...? Normally you don't.
Anyhow. The 3 mins @5meters or 3mins @15feet or whatever Padi/SSI/CMAS/.... taught you orginally comes from an original recommendation to ascend from 30' to surface continuously and slowly over 5-7 minutes.
Diving associations might have found that a too difficult instruction for the average stupid diver and created the 5mins @X feet rule.
Now, whatever your dive was like and how deep it was, just make sure to go up super slowly once shallower than 30 feet.
NEVER go down again after a deco stop or a shallow dive to obey the safety stop rule. Rather continue a super slow ascent from where you are or just sit a few more minutes between where you are and the surface to help tissues reduce the pressure gradient that they built up during depth.
AND: Please regard the safety stop as a MUST-DO stop unless you have really urgent reasons to skip it. Keep in mind that according to various literature dive computers still accept a probability of DCS ranging between 2 and 5% percent with a probability of DCS2 (neurological) of 0.2-0.5%.
Btw... German CMAS federation "VDST" is recommending to ascent 3 feet per minute after safety stop until you surface.
Now think about walking 15 feet within 5 minutes... that is super slow! Don't want to discuss if that recommendation is a bit over the top... But what I am saying is that one of the largest CMAS federations is recommending to surface even slower than any previous recommendation and I am pretty sure they're doing this for a reason.
Cheers
Like everyone else says, on dives above 30' it's rather pointless, on deeper dives it depends on how close you get to your no-stop limit. On shore dives we too usually follow the sand to waist-deep, that ends up being a very extended safety stop.
There is another tangent, though: if you are diving in a group with DM, they would normally insist on you doing a safety stop. I have not dived with an op who didn't insist on (at least) a 3/3, granted, they're all dives deeper than 10 msw.
Darnold9999
Contributor
First 20 years or so safety stops were not a thing so I have a fairly flexible view of them.
The closer to NDL the longer I wait at 15 - 20 feet and the slower I ascend. Also the first few dives in a trip, or the first dive after it has been a while, the longer I wait and the slower I ascend. For a shallow dive that comes nowhere near NDL I just ascend the last 15 - 20 feet slowly and depending on what there is to see will cut the safety stop to something like a minute rather than three. If I am closer to NDL on a deeper (more than 100 feet) dive then I like to putz around at 30 feet or so for a few minutes and then stop at 15 for the full 3 minutes - possibly even more if there is something interesting to watch, and then ascend really slowly.
Overall, sitting at 15 to 20 feet for a few minutes has allowed me to see things that I otherwise would never see so I tend to take my time. The only time I have seen dolphins in the water while diving was sitting at a safety stop hanging on to the bar under Nekton in Belize, a pod decided we were worth investigating.
The closer to NDL the longer I wait at 15 - 20 feet and the slower I ascend. Also the first few dives in a trip, or the first dive after it has been a while, the longer I wait and the slower I ascend. For a shallow dive that comes nowhere near NDL I just ascend the last 15 - 20 feet slowly and depending on what there is to see will cut the safety stop to something like a minute rather than three. If I am closer to NDL on a deeper (more than 100 feet) dive then I like to putz around at 30 feet or so for a few minutes and then stop at 15 for the full 3 minutes - possibly even more if there is something interesting to watch, and then ascend really slowly.
Overall, sitting at 15 to 20 feet for a few minutes has allowed me to see things that I otherwise would never see so I tend to take my time. The only time I have seen dolphins in the water while diving was sitting at a safety stop hanging on to the bar under Nekton in Belize, a pod decided we were worth investigating.
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SurfGF allows you to make this a quanitatve exercise, ascend when your SurfGF is at an acceptable value.
fisheater
Contributor
Computers don't get bent. Algorithms don't get bent.
People get bent.
As you're a person, take the extra steps to be safer than your computer and its algorithm. Listening to people who have taken unnecessary risks and lived, is like listening to people who drink and drive. Just because they've made it so far, doesn't mean that their actions are safe, just that they haven't seen the consequences yet.
People get bent.
As you're a person, take the extra steps to be safer than your computer and its algorithm. Listening to people who have taken unnecessary risks and lived, is like listening to people who drink and drive. Just because they've made it so far, doesn't mean that their actions are safe, just that they haven't seen the consequences yet.
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