02 safety stop

[salt h20]

im just curious if breathing 100% o2 on your safety stop after a non decompression dive would benefit u? if so how? seems like it would.

 

[sbrooks]

I would say yes, it would benefit you. It would allow you to off-gas more nitrogen before breaking the surface. It seems like an added step of caution on top of an "already there" step of caution (the safety stop). To breath 100% O2 requires advanced nitrox/tech training - which is why I would say most rec divers wouldn't do it.

 

[Jimmer]

Well I think that it likely would benefit you for the same reason as decompressing on O2 would. It would help flush out the Nitrogen faster. I do something similar in the respect that I sling a bottle of 40% or 50% on my NDL dives, and I switch to it for my ascent at the appropriate depth. I do this primarily for practice with my deco training, but it does help flush the N2 faster.

 

[Soggy]

im just curious if breathing 100% o2 on your safety stop after a non decompression dive would benefit u? if so how? seems like it would.

It might benefit you, but only marginally. Gases take a good 3-5 minutes to circulate through your system and realize full benefit. That's about the same amount of time as a safety stop, so you'd be ascending by the time your system got flushed with O2 anyhow.

 

[Jimmer]

I just remembered meeting a guy a while back before I was getting into my deco training, that said after a deco dive he would sit on the boat and breathe the rest of his O2. I don't know if there is any proof that continuing on O2 after a deco dive would help at all, I would imagine it certainly wouldn't hurt, provided you didn't breathe too long on it and cause tissue damage to your lungs.

 

[String]

May not help on a standard rec profile but wont hurt provided buoyancy and so on is good enough to maintain depth and the PP1.6.

Its overkill though for most profiles i suspect.

 

[WesTexDiver]

Beware of the masking effect O2 can have. Yes it helps, I would not suggest doing it unless properlty trained. If you want a safer profile, it would make more sense to dive EAN and use the standard NDL tables, which would be cheaper as well, again not without training.

 

[Gary D.]

I’m going to say yes and no. I’m behind it and I’m against it. Will it benefit you? Maybe yes, maybe no.

First off a very large majority of recreational divers have trouble with one gas and just the standard diving gear. Now throw in a second bottle and reg and you have a recipe for disaster.

For example; you have the bottle on and a panicked diver grabs the wrong reg at depth you have just compounded the problem. You have the bottle off and try to take a breath, suck nothing, freak out and bolt to the surface creating a problem. We could what if this to death but I think the risk out weighs the benefit.

If you feel the urge to go on 100% O2 do it ON the boat or on the shore. Without a great deal of experience and additional training the potential for a disaster is just way to high. O2 is a very dangerous drug and is not something to be played with.

Gary D.

 

[CrawfishDiver]

I would think breathing it on the boat would be a bad Idea. It would hide any dci symptoms. Isnt this the same reason you take people off O2 when treated?

 

[TASea]

Breathing O2 doesn't hide dci symptoms, it relieves them. The treatment for dci is breathing pure O2 at elevated pressure (hyperbaric treatment), with air breaks as appropriate.