This is a copyrighted document, but it was paid for with Sea Grant money.
I found it while doing research on Drinking and Diving. I has an interesting perspective on the topic as seen from the mid 80's.
I don't believe that this addresses the the OP's question. The article seems to address binge drinking while on vacation. That's stupid even if you DON'T dive.
@NetDoc, Oh my gosh, you are so correct. I
*ass*u*me* too much sometimes.
@billmosel, Sorry about not addressing your original question specifically.
"If I have a beer at lunch (noon) and want to dive at 3:00, how is that going to impair my judgement or dehydrate me?"
Given the need for the
Sea Grant program to pay for an article about
binge drinking and diving, that kind of behavior must have been common enough to be a
concern in the mid 1980s. Since divers were not
"dropping like flies" at the time my guess is that a beer at lunch with a three hour surface interval would be fine.
By the way, at that time I had been certified for about 10 years. I did not engage in
"resort diving" as the author of the article did. I lived here in the Keys at the time and can say from
personal observation that there were a lot of divers who drank and dove. It wasn't that big a deal. But then there was a higher rate of DCS hits back then too.
Of course, the "rule of thumb" was not to rise faster than your bubbles. That rate sends off the alarms in my current dive computer like crazy. Additionally, almost nobody had a pressure gage that they took anywhere near the water. So, often your first hint of "low air" was not being able to suck a breath from the tank. That meant
quicker ascents in addition to all the other
confounding factors.
All in all, if modest drinking were a
real (not manufactured) problem, it would be obvious by just looking at the statistics of 30 years of dive accidents.
--
Bud