No Deco rules - Local Island Diving - Maldives

[Heat Miser]

To give us an idea about the overall profile, what were the average depths? I would imagine they were generally no deeper than 15-20 m (50-65 ft) or many of the divers would have exceeded NDL on some of the dives.

NDL Dive GF 45/95 total run time 38 min (add on 3 min safety stop)

Dive GF 50/70 (same Bottom time, more deco) total run time 49 min

 

[Heat Miser]

I typically dive 3 dives a day with conservative settings of -2 on my Suunto Eon Core and I’ve never had a problem in last 75 dives or so with it. But that’s for the strictly recreational dives - when I learn deco diving next year I plan to keep it strictly at 0 default until I figure I need to be more conservative or not. Not inclined to test the algorithm liberally for deco dives even in theory the way I think about it right now.

If you are going to start diving deco, flick the Suunto and get something running the Bühlmann ZHL-16C dive algorithm. (i.e. Garmin. Shearwater).

The only way you can have a somewhat sensible conversation with your buddy, about dive profile, is if you are running the same algorithm.

Most of the work in deco diving is around the gas planning and runtime management, very hard to do if you cant agree total runtimes.

 

[Heat Miser]

I subesequently downloaded a PADI dive table and I think @boulderjohn is right, There is a very low risk of DCS on the low conservative setting on GARMIN, assuming your doing no deco diving and max depths above 30 meters.

My analogy should be the locals are doing 14-16 MPH in a 15 MPH zone, I'm doing 12 MPH.

Regards

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[Jai Bar]

The Maldives have some local recreational diving regulations (https://archive.tourism.gov.mv/downloads/Divingregulations2003.pdf) restrictions for 30m depth, no deco etc. are probably because they wnat to avoid as much as possible divers getting DCS, knowing the vast distances between diving areas and deco chamber it seems reasonable.

If by "local divers" you mean dive guides who do 3-4 dives on a daily basis, then in most operations that I've been they usually plan the dive so that they don't stay at 30m until the last second of NDL time, they try to gradually multilevel the dive to shallower depths, unless it is a very special dive site such as some chanel with hoardes of sharks. The guests usually have higher gas consumption rate so in many cases they are the ones limiting the bottom time.

In some places I've seen guides asking guests no more than 45 minute dives. One hour is reasonable for a diving safari, for example, as they have to move between sites etc. if some guests would stay in water for 1.5-2 hours it can impact the time schedule, is more task load for the crew, guides and so on.