Ascending faster than 60ft/minute

[engdiver]

New bubbles are made with every breath maintaining the same size each time. I always follow these as I ascend. If not then yes the first bubbles made at the bottom reach the surface very quickly.

 

[Thalassamania]

You have the instrumentation to do 60ft/min easily, look at your watch and depth gauge, start up, after 10 seconds check your depth gauge, it should have changed 10 feet, after 10 feet check your watch, it should have chenged 10 seconds, etc.

 

[TSandM]

Diver0001 had an excellent post on shaping the ascent curve here. In fact, that whole thread on trusting computers is an excellent read, most of which is not about computers per se, but about decompression models and ascents.

 

[engdiver]

I have done this once by simply counting to ten as I ascended from 40' to 30'. After reading this discussion it has sparked my interest in how fast I have have been ascending all this time at different depths. I will let everyone know what I find.

 

[DiveMaven]

Someone in a discussion yesterday cited the PADI book as teaching them 60 ft/min recently too. I was surprised too, several agencies have adopted 30 ft/min. I heard a rumor that perhaps there is too much capital or revenue around the RDP for them to consider 30 ft/min (That joke made by a PADI DM, don't shoot the messenger).

If you've got a PADI ow book that states 30 ft/min please cite the page and pub date. Thanks.

I don't have a PADI OW book that states 30 ft/min, but I'll never forget 2 years ago getting yelled at by an instructor on our 4th OW dive for ascending faster than 30 ft/min. When we told him our materials said 60 ft/min, he backed down and remarked that the current standard was 30 ft/min, and that we must have been using old materials. They were both NAUI and PADI instructors, so perhaps that's why they said that. Oops, sorry for mis-speaking.

 

[akbpilot]

Originally Posted by akbpilot
My wife and I did a Padi course in January, books stated 60 ft/min max ascent rate. One person in class had to wait a session to receive her books, as a fresh batch was coming in. Her's used 60 ft/ min also. Our instructor made a point of saying that was a "max", and slower was better. Safety stops were also "strongly urged", and simulated at 5' inthe pool. OW dives with another PADI shop always used a safety stop @ 15' partly to instill it in us, and partly to send up a marker, and check for boat traffic before finishing ascent.

This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. Here we have outdated information bing spread under the auspice of the best known recreational training agency. Is this because the Instructors involved don’t not know any better, because they don’t want to go against "the book” or … ?



Minimizing diving risk requires practice, practice with your gear, practice of your skills and practice with your mind. You must stay current. None of us always succeed … we all learn new thing every day. But for an instructor to not be conversant with something so mainstream that it was up on the DAN website in 2004 is, I fear, negligent.

I guess I didn't make myself clear in my original post. Even though the PADI books (outdated as they may be) used the 60'/min ascent rate, the instructors in both shops I used taught a slower ascent rate. I didn't get the impression they were "blindly" following the course in any aspect. There were many instances where they used their own criteria to get a point across. During the classroom the phrase "The book says....but I..." was usually followed by a personal observation or point that was more conservative or detailed then the book. The open water shop went through all the basic PADI skills, a few of the "optional" ones, and the instructor had us doing just basic "dive" tasks ( come up, come down, look under this rock, go through this little swim-through, follow this ray, etc ) just to see us perform, and offered critques during the post dive. As it has been stated many times on this board, "It's not the Agency, it's the instructor".

 

[Thalassamania]

Exactly nothing aimed at PADI here, these instuctors, I'm sorry to day, were (are) woefully out of date.

 

[akbpilot]

Exactly nothing aimed at PADI here, these instuctors, I'm sorry to day, were (are) woefully out of date.

I'm curious, how were the instructors "woefully out of date"? They taught the slower ascent rate. If anything, the agency materials, which were recently supplied to them, were out of date.

 

[Walter]

As it has been stated many times on this board, "It's not the Agency, it's the instructor".

If what you report is true, then it's instructors making up for an agency short coming.

 

[hvulin]

Take a bottle of Cola and open it... Those bubbles you see are exactly what can happen in your blood if you go too fast! Now ask yourself what happens if those bubbles go somewhere and get blocked (and you are still surfacing)...

Just take it slow...