247 Feet -- "We can't stay here for very long"

[USMC CPL.]

You know there is a difference between ignorance and stupidity and being adventurous and pushing the boundaries. In mountain climbing, the smart ones back away from summiting Mt Everest when they know its stupid (weather, cerebral edema...). Smart divers, say no when the risk is too high. Like calling the dive when it just doesn't feel good. Or refusing to dive when the conditions are poor but you paid $xx.yy for a dive trip.

I understand fully but have read dive related articles of Divers deciding to push their personal skills for nothing more than saying I have been to 200 feet on a single tank of air. Sometimes they Dodge the bullet and other times they lose. Why because they wanted to push the envelope now instead of getting the proper training, knowledge, skills and equipment to do the dive safely and have some sort of attainable goal. You did hit the nail on the head maybe some Divers should take a lesson from climbers who have paid 65k for a chance to stand at the top only to turn around a few hundred meters shy of their goal because they realized that a summit is not worth their life.

 

[Kevrumbo]

So true. Dives to 1000 feet on scuba. What is next. How far are the boundaries going to be pushed before someone says enough.

Physiologic boundary for ambient pressure exposure Scuba diving is probably right there at 36 ATA, with limits due to ppO2, HPNS, and gas density for mixed gas Heliox; And 16 ATA for Air due to gas density, extreme narcosis & ppO2. In the case of deep Air, a record seeking Scuba diver cannot stay at depth for more than a minute or two before succumbing to metabolic CO2 poisoning. (See good reference article: Advanced Knowledge Series: The Gas Density Conundrum )

Based on the science we know now and looking back in hindsight, it was a Cousteau colleague seventy years ago who first found the boundary to deep Air dives (but unfortunately didn't survive):
Maurice Fargues - Wikipedia

Deep diving - Wikipedia

 

[Akimbo]

@compressor and @USMC CPL.

I take a little different view. It depends on the purpose. Some made-up nonsense like who can dive deeper on Scuba in a pink wetsuit on a Tuesday afternoon... definitely pointless. Who can dive deeper and accomplish meaningful work on a repeatable basis is good. If somebody came up with a pill to solve all Oxygen Toxicity to 500 Meters, that's would be really good. Picking a tag off a downline in a marginally functional state and making it back to the surface by the grace of god... not so much. Sad as it may be, sometimes it is best to allow Darwin to do his work.

 

[USMC CPL.]

@compressor and @USMC CPL.

I take a little different view. It depends on the purpose. Some made-up nonsense like who can dive deeper on Scuba in a pink wetsuit on a Tuesday afternoon... definitely pointless. Who can dive deeper and accomplish meaningful work on a repeatable basis is good. If somebody came up with a pill to solve all Oxygen Toxicity to 500 Meters, that's would be really good. Picking a tag off a downline in a marginally functional state and making it back to the surface by the grace of god... not so much. Sad as it may be, sometimes it is best to allow Darwin to do his work.

Agree with you 100%. Nothing wrong with it if you have an attainable goal but just to say hey I going to push it and see how far I can go before I die is stupid. As you said natural selection at it's best.

 

[Compressor]

Who can dive deeper and accomplish meaningful work on a repeatable basis is good. If somebody came up with a pill to solve all Oxygen Toxicity to 500 Meters,

Yes that would be progress. No doubt and I am all for it.

Sad as it may be, sometimes it is best to allow Darwin to do his work.

Darwin is at work all the time as you say. All we have to do is look at our society (drugs, alcohol, DWI, wars, unhealthy lifestyles). Not a topic here but humans may not be the smartest species on our planet.

 

[USMC CPL.]

Yes that would be progress. No doubt and I am all for it.


Darwin is at work all the time as you say. All we have to do is look at our society (drugs, alcohol, DWI, wars, unhealthy lifestyles). Not a topic here but humans may not be the smartest species on our planet.

Yep. We are the only species on the planet that kills it's own kind for no reason.

 

[MrVegas]

Thanks for all of the interesting responses. I wound up reading a lot of the materials on this diving history sub forum, along with random walks through some of the Wikipedia links and other Scubaboard posts. (Including some of the deep air records stories -- and the sad stories of some of the failed attempts.) Really fascinating stuff -- there seems to be never-ending debate over a huge range of issues for those trying to go deeper (gas mixes, decompression algorithms, equipment, etc.).

I'm happy with my shallow quarries for now (and maybe some shallow Great Lakes wrecks next summer). A few years down the road, maybe I'll work up to the U-352 dive in North Carolina, but that's probably as deep as I will ever see. The diving and mountain climbing stories sort of make you realize the narrow range of environmental conditions required for our bodies to operate properly. However, people will always want to see how far, how fast, how deep, how high, etc. that they can go (e.g., parachuting from 120,000 feet is pretty nuts, too).

I'll probably watch some more of those old Cousteau shows with my son. Still good stuff to watch. After all of these years, glad I finally decided to actually start diving.

 

[txgoose]

Not a topic here but humans may not be the smartest species on our planet.

You're talking like I can't hear you!
j/k

 

[Akimbo]

I wound up reading a lot of the materials on this diving history sub forum, along with random walks through some of the Wikipedia links and other Scubaboard posts.

I hope that journey was interesting and enlightening. As a whole, accomplishments that are remembered as milestones tend to be coincidental/secondary with "records", regardless of the activity. What makes them noteworthy is what was learned and did it make something repeatable. To some extent, dives that were unsuccessful had more value because it expanded the human knowledge base.

The great majority of the cumulative knowledge presented in diving classes at all levels resulted from accidents that scared the hell out of, injured, or killed someone. Thanks to all the pioneers the preceded me, living or not.

 

[drbill]

A few years back I was diving repetitively to 200 fsw to film at those depths. I took about three months of gradually deeper diving to get there and dove almost daily. I experienced relatively little narcosis while at maximum depth and could locate, frame and follow movement of critters with my camera with no problem. I never went deeper than 201 fsw because I had set that as my limit. More recently I've been noticeably narced at depths as shallow as 107 fsw which I attribute to a decreased frequency of dives and less tolerance of the nitrogen build-up.

When I worked with a few Cousteau dive crews, we rarely went below 100 fsw as bottom time was important in filming.