deco dive frequency?

[KentB]

Ive spent the better part of 2019 doing my first entry level tech courses advanced nitrox deco procedures extended range and currently 8 dives into advanced wreck.

basically curious how many/often deco dives you guys and gals do? and whether its planned and staged or just 5-10 min backgas deco kinda thing.

currently and when you first got into decompression diving?

i would say 1/3-4 dives for me now is a planned deco dive.
goal for this year is to get out 40 different times with 2 deco gases.

cheers!

 

[rjack321]

I never "wing it" with "only a little" deco. Its either planned deco (usually a range like 15-25mins or 60-75mins) or the dive is <NDL.
I have never done backgas deco, although I have done extended shallow stops on multilevel NDL dives.

While AN/DP allows you to use as many deco gasses as you want, I would suggest sticking with 1 deco gas for the foreseeable future. You dont need 2 deco gases for 20mins of deco (50% by itself is fine). As a new deco diver you dont need to jack up your risk by diving 2 deco gases for no necessary reason.

 

[KentB]

I never "wing it" with "only a little" deco. Its either planned deco (usually a range like 20-30mins or 60-75mins) or the dive is <NDL.
I have never done backgas deco, although I have done extended shallow stops on multilevel NDL dives.

how often do you do deco dives vs NDL dives?

 

[rjack321]

how often do you do deco dives vs NDL dives?

Annually:
45 deco dives usually with between 30 and 120mins of deco
10-15 NDL dives

 

[Doppler]

I never "wing it" with "only a little" deco. Its either planned deco (usually a range like 15-25mins or 60-75mins) or the dive is <NDL.
I have never done backgas deco, although I have done extended shallow stops on multilevel NDL dives.

While AN/DP allows you to use as many deco gasses as you want, I would suggest sticking with 1 deco gas for the foreseeable future. You dont need 2 deco gases for 20mins of deco (50% by itself is fine). As a new deco diver you dont need to jack up your risk by diving 2 deco gases for no necessary reason.

@KentB: good advice from an experienced practitioner. The advice to stick to one gas is really worth thinking about. Introducing a second decompression gas at this point in your diving is not only unnecessary (unless you are diving well beyond your certification/experience/comprehension level), but also, carrying one more bottle may present problems. Firstly, an additional gas would make an insignificant difference to your ascent time, and secondly, the opportunity to **** up during gas switches is greatly increased. All this quite apart from the additional stress and task-loading of moving another lump of metal around with you.

Spend this coming year learning the curve of the decompression algorithm (whichever one you've chosen to use) and work on simulated "come to jesus" scenarios. One might be completing your ascent from say 20 metres to the surface while feathering your deco tank... (simulated free-flowing first stage)

 

[helodriver87]

Think I did somewhere around 220-230 deco dives this year. Like @rjack321 said, it's always planned. I'll know what to expect within a few minutes left or right, so I can validate what my computer is spitting out against the tables I cut and compare to average depth or runtime to see if that makes sense. Most of my dives this year were cave dives, so they tend to run longer and get into deco more often, even in the recreational depth range. Deco times ran from 10 min to 110 min, depths from 50' to 215'.

 

[tbone1004]

@Doppler welcome back Steve! long time no see!

I don't go into unplanned deco. I will often plan for a 5-10 minute backgas deco, but that's more of a mandatory safety stop than it is actual decompression. I could easily make that an NDL dive with less conservative gradient factors, but since I use pretty conservative GF's, they end up being mandatory.

In terms of percentage. It's probably 70% NDL dives. Most of my dives for personal diving are fairly long, and nearly 100% of those have mandatory decompression, but I log a large quantity of dives working with students and those are largely all NDL. It takes a long time to get 20 cave dives with an average dive time of 2.5 hours. It doesn't take nearly as long to get 20 OW dives at 30-45 minutes, especially when you do 4-5/day, vs a single cave dive

 

[PfcAJ]

About 50% of my dives are deco dives. I knock out a fair bit of rec dives every year down in the Cayman Islands which really drops the deco dive percentage.

 

[100days-a-year]

350+ dives a year.
Most have some deco.
Planned RTs of 30 min max and depths to 180' up to 7 times a day with as close to 2hr SI as possible.
For any longer dives or trimix 2 dives a day unless it's pretty shallow.

 

[KentB]

@KentB: good advice from an experienced practitioner. The advice to stick to one gas is really worth thinking about. Introducing a second decompression gas at this point in your diving is not only unnecessary (unless you are diving well beyond your certification/experience/comprehension level), but also, carrying one more bottle may present problems. Firstly, an additional gas would make an insignificant difference to your ascent time, and secondly, the opportunity to **** up during gas switches is greatly increased. All this quite apart from the additional stress and task-loading of moving another lump of metal around with you.

Spend this coming year learning the curve of the decompression algorithm (whichever one you've chosen to use) and work on simulated "come to jesus" scenarios. One might be completing your ascent from say 20 metres to the surface while feathering your deco tank... (simulated free-flowing first stage)

extended range brought in a 2nd deco gas. i did the courses in sidemount I really didn't notice any additional task loading carrying another deco gas. I like carrying 2 deco gases strictly for a lost deco gas scenario. more dive planning i do the more i see carrying a 2nd deco gas is a better idea. it also wasnt a weekend course I had over 800 min bottom time

this thread idea was more geared towards curiosity on the frequency of deco dives people do not anything else.