AOW deep diving question

[coldwaterdufus]

Craig / B Lo, thanks for the clarification. During my OW ( only last year ) 60ft limit was pounded into my head as a limit, not as a recommendation. 60 ft, do not go deeper.

 

[stargost]

Sure. Use the "Martini 's Law"
Have a friend watching over you while you drink few Martinis ... one for each 10m increments ..... I bet after 4 or 5 Martinis you will start feeling "weird"

By the way, do this at your home and NOT while diving.
And don't drive after drinking

Alberto (aka eDiver)

i know the comparison is widely used, but i never really liked it much for it can be too far away from diving:

For example, under heavy stress conditions, during important business dinners, abroad, with many things to listen and to deal with, I can drink many many martini (more suju or sake) and feel nothing at all.
I would call it "work under heavy task loading" ;-) but the concentrations and outcomes makes me control myself heavily.
On the other hand, on a Friday night with Friends, 1 martini and I'm already singing on a table (image). This would be the no stress, no pb conditions. And still the alcohol effect is heavy.

I would // first 'life' example to cold, low viz, dark, heavy task load, where the narc probability is very high, even shallower than 100.
I would // second 'life' example to 90F water, 100ft viz, noon time in tropical paradize diving, where you can hoover at 150ft admiring the sharks or other cool stuff, and don't feel narced at all.


Not sure if I made my point, but I guess what I'm trying to say is making a comparison of martini effect on land vs under water has its limit.


Back to the op,
AOW is a path to rescue, so needed anyway, deep is part of it and is max 100ft (for a few seconds..., depending on the instructor)
doesn't really matter, at the end not much key deep dive stuff will be mentioned during that course, and much more to be learned on this board/books, and divings with experienced people on this subject.

 

[halocline]

To the OP, if you're really interested in deeper diving you should head towards a tech class and skip the deep specialty all together.

There are several reasons for limiting recreational dive depths; narcosis is only one. Two very big ones are gas management and decompression procedures. Those include all the issues that arise as soon as you are in an overhead (either physical or deco-imposed). It means being trained to deal with problems at depth, rather than relying on immediate access to the surface to solve problems. This is a fundamentally different approach to diving.

 

[acwest]

There are good reasons for the recommendation, but it is quite possible to work your way up to deeper dives the old-fashioned way, experience and mentoring. Of course, having an instructor teach you is one of the better ways to receive both experience and mentoring

 

[Thalassamania]

130 is also, "just a recommendation" based on nothing more than the U.S. Navy decision, at one time, to switch, in most but not all cases, from scuba to surface supplied air at 130. In the science diving community we have had a depth limit of 190, based on the U.S. Navy's similar limit and the end of the Standard Air Tables.

 

[eelnoraa]

Going to 100 feet and just looking at your gauges, doing a combination lock, or a couple math problems doesn't really task load most people. That is why in my deep dive we start with a few quick math problems. Then I tie off a reel and do a swim of about 100 feet horizontally. Once we get there I hand the reel to the student and they need to bring us back in to the platform. Oh and it is dark, and there is 3-6 feet of silt that we are swimming 2 feet above. The student has to bring us back keeping tension on the reel, when we get to the platform they need to untie it, secure the line, and hand it to me. Then just as we start the ascent I pull an OOA and we share air horizontally to the 50 foot stop where we retrieve the stages and finish the dive as a multilevel. If someone is going to show the effects it will be during the tie off swim and return. And If they look at me goofy when I drop my reg and signal OOA or get wide-eyed and look like they are getting ready to bolt it clearly demonstrates the effects.

I consider min depth for deep 85-90 feet. 60-70 may meet standards but not in my book. That would be taking a short cut and not preparing the student for an actual deep dive.

Wow, you class sounds like a lot of fun. And I would say the situtation is a lot more trickier than average AOW (at least mine). I image you won't tell you student the OOA part ahead of time, right??

I really like how instructors throw in some real life unexpected items into the course. It is the safest way to experience the "sh*t happen" when under supervision of experienced divers/instructors. And by experiencing the bads, one can learn to prevent it from happening or at least know how to act if it really happen.

 

[Herk_Man]

Just curious about something. The OP talks about going for his AOW next month. He is therefore, I assume, OW currently. He also talks about going deeper than 60 ft many times. The current max for OW certs. is 60ft. What am I missing here ? Why is he diving quite a bit deeper than his current certification ? And why are people taking him deeper than his cert ? I know a lot of people probably do this, it just seems to me to be too fast, too soon, to be wanting to experience narcosis. I have a similar number of dives, last thing I want to be doing. There's a lot of other stuff going on that needs to be mastered beforehand. Just my opinion.

Unless you are in France, there are no laws restricting what you do while diving. Certification is purely for the purposes of showing dive operations that you have trained to do the dives they offer to take you on. Many of us, myself included, dove for many years at many depths without a single card in their pocket.

So, going below 60' without training, depending on the circumstances, probably not wise. Against any rule? No.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

Actually I do inform the the student that I will be doing an OOA. But after staging the bottles, descending, doing the math, and swimming with the reel it still tends to catch them off guard. Because what I don't tell them is when. Could be when they hand me the reel after securing it. Could be when we actually touch the line for the ascent, or anywhere in between.

As to the 60 ft limit. SEI Diving OW divers are technically trained to 100 feet. We strongly recommend that they stay above 60 and work towards 100 over time and with an experienced diver. It is why we cover deco and gas management in OW class. Not to teach them to do deco but to clearly illustrate what the consequences are if you are reckless.

Our goal is yes to produce safe divers. But it is also to produce divers that want to come back for training. Not because they have to. We cover SAC rates, deco, gas management and dive planning that can be used as a basis for expanding their limits without coming back unless they want to. Problem is many ops want to see a card that says they went down with an instructor. Even if it was to 70 feet for 10 minutes which to me is not a deep dive.

 

[k374]

@coldwaterdufus,
An AOW card is not necessary to dive to 100', usually dive ops make an observation during an initial shallower dive and based on what they see the DM gives the OK for other more advanced sites...this has been my experience anyway. Technically a student can complete OW and AOW back to back and not have any real world experience at all and still have a card saying they are "advanced" and qualified for 100', so I doubt the card itself amounts to much.

I think the rate of progress varies between individuals, so whether one is qualified to dive deep cannot be ascertained just by number of dives I think.

The reason I wanted to "experience" the effects of narcosis was that I have been told by some other divers that it is beneficial to recognize the onset of these symptoms. An AOW diver did tell me that his instructor did this exercise during his deep dive and he thought he learned a lot from it.

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

I a big fan of full disclosure. AFAIK, 100' is not the limit for the PADI AOW Deep Dive; it is the limit for Instructors who have not received written permission to conduct the AOW Deep Dive at a deeper depth. Many divers, including me, have been certified AOW with a deep dive to the deck of the USCGC Duane, which for me was ~108' deep (your tide may vary). To use an up to 110' site for AOW Deep, the Instructor had to both ask PADI for permission in writing and receive said written permission from PADI.