Good points Bob. I think things are changing, as slow as it may be. Divers and instructors are catching on and eventually agencies will follow. It's always "the establishment" who's last to catch on.
I remember a while back when DAN came out and anounced that they had concluded deep stops were good. Shortly after that, NAUI anounced their rule of halves (a dumb name). The funny thing is that divers had been using deeper stops for many years when DAN finally had their revelation. PADI promptly anounced in their Journal that there was no demonstratable benefit for recreational divers. I think we could use decompression models as old as the light bulb to examine some typical recreational week long profiles and easily demonstrate the potential benefit. The no-benefit arguement is, I think, based on the realative low numbers of divers who are bent.
Still what if those divers don't need to get bent? Maybe the lack of benefit they're refering to is really the business case for developing new tables to sell. And again, some of the chambers in resort areas are pretty busy. I mentioned that a while ago and some one responded that instructors and DM's were taking up more chamber time than customers. Well, what does that tell us? If any one should know how to not get bent it's the pros. No?
I've had some heavy teaching days when I felt pretty lousy afterward. Once I probably should have headed for a chamber. Never was any of the diving outside of the tables or computors I was using. I changed the way I dive and the problems went away. Sadly, the answers didn't come from any agency or DAN. They came from people doing lots of diving and trying real hard to not get hurt.
Rob started a thread to address this, but I've also felt pretty lousy after doing too much in the way of deep stops so you can't just arbitrarily stop too long too deep.
The NAUI rule of halves is probably a step in the right direction but it's still pretty arbitrary.
I know very few divers doing deep or long dives who don't modify their schedules whether they come from software or tables. They modify them based on how they feel and sometimes after a serious incident. Divers doing lots of dives like instructors or vacationers can benefit similarly...especially the older, fatter or more out of shape ones...nothing derogetory meant, we all go through these changes to one degreee or another. Not that the casual diver needs to dive like a technical diver but they can certainly make use of some of the things learned by them. The cutting edge stuff that's really changing things is NOT comming from nor will it come from agencies or organizations like DAN. The significance that has for the casual diver is that it means that not reading it in a book doesn't make it not true. The authors won't write the books until the divers explain things to them. LOL First comes the dives and later the books and explainations.
Depth averaging, ratio deco or any number of other little tricks are just some things divers are using to simplify and control what's going on. Unsafe, as some here have claimed? It's working and we aren't reading in DAN about the guy in the chamber who averaged depths. I think the combination of inert gas loads and ignorance is what's unsafe.
I remember a while back when DAN came out and anounced that they had concluded deep stops were good. Shortly after that, NAUI anounced their rule of halves (a dumb name). The funny thing is that divers had been using deeper stops for many years when DAN finally had their revelation. PADI promptly anounced in their Journal that there was no demonstratable benefit for recreational divers. I think we could use decompression models as old as the light bulb to examine some typical recreational week long profiles and easily demonstrate the potential benefit. The no-benefit arguement is, I think, based on the realative low numbers of divers who are bent.
Still what if those divers don't need to get bent? Maybe the lack of benefit they're refering to is really the business case for developing new tables to sell. And again, some of the chambers in resort areas are pretty busy. I mentioned that a while ago and some one responded that instructors and DM's were taking up more chamber time than customers. Well, what does that tell us? If any one should know how to not get bent it's the pros. No?
I've had some heavy teaching days when I felt pretty lousy afterward. Once I probably should have headed for a chamber. Never was any of the diving outside of the tables or computors I was using. I changed the way I dive and the problems went away. Sadly, the answers didn't come from any agency or DAN. They came from people doing lots of diving and trying real hard to not get hurt.
Rob started a thread to address this, but I've also felt pretty lousy after doing too much in the way of deep stops so you can't just arbitrarily stop too long too deep.
The NAUI rule of halves is probably a step in the right direction but it's still pretty arbitrary.
I know very few divers doing deep or long dives who don't modify their schedules whether they come from software or tables. They modify them based on how they feel and sometimes after a serious incident. Divers doing lots of dives like instructors or vacationers can benefit similarly...especially the older, fatter or more out of shape ones...nothing derogetory meant, we all go through these changes to one degreee or another. Not that the casual diver needs to dive like a technical diver but they can certainly make use of some of the things learned by them. The cutting edge stuff that's really changing things is NOT comming from nor will it come from agencies or organizations like DAN. The significance that has for the casual diver is that it means that not reading it in a book doesn't make it not true. The authors won't write the books until the divers explain things to them. LOL First comes the dives and later the books and explainations.
Depth averaging, ratio deco or any number of other little tricks are just some things divers are using to simplify and control what's going on. Unsafe, as some here have claimed? It's working and we aren't reading in DAN about the guy in the chamber who averaged depths. I think the combination of inert gas loads and ignorance is what's unsafe.
