Snorkeling after diving with a Shearwater Teric

[Outbound]

Please forgive me if this is a silly question...

I am about to pull the trigger on a new Shearwater Teric to replace my Suunto Vyper Novo. There's nothing wrong with the Suunto but it's big and clunky and I now know that I would prefer to have a watch-sized computer. Plus, the screen on the Teric looks amazing.

Anyway, my wife isn't a diver but we enjoy some easy snorkeling together when we're on vacation and I'm done with diving for the day or have a long surface interval (such as between morning boat dives and a night shore dive). Naturally, I like to wear a watch when snorkeling to keep track of time. My question is this: if I wear my Teric while snorkeling and occasionally dive under the surface - typically I'll duck under to about 10' or so, maybe 15' maximum - would that affect how it tracks my tissue loading/surface interval? In other words, is it going to go into dive mode every time I descend a few feet, and if so will it count it as a dive if I only stay under for a few seconds (maybe 30" max)? I know that it will reset the deco tissues if I switch it to Gauge or Freedive mode, but I'm just talking about using it as a watch while snorkeling between dives.

 

[sea_ledford]

Yes, it will start logging it as a dive. How much it will affect your surface interval would depend on how long and how deep you go.

I also feel I should add in a line here about how you shouldn't freedive after diving. Surface snorkeling is one thing, but once you start actual diving underwater, weird things start happening. All dependant on your current nitrogen load and how deep you end up actually freediving of course.

-Chris

 

[Outbound]

Thanks. Yeah, I've read up about freediving after being on scuba, and I want to point out that I'm definitely not going freediving. According to a DAN post by Neal W. Pollock, he has little worries about breath-hold diving to 10'-15' even immediately after a compressed gas dive that was a couple of steps below the Navy no-deco dive table limits. With the type of diving and snorkeling that I do, I'm not at all worried. However, I suppose such snorkeling might have an effect on how the Teric computes my residual nitrogen and thus NDL times for subsequent scuba dives.

I guess I'll just let the Teric do its thing and see what effect it has on the calculations. With the style of snorkeling I do, my guess is that it won't really affect anything other than giving me a couple of extra very short and very shallow "dives" in my log.

 

[DavidFL]

I wore my Teric while snorkeling in Hawaii this year, and I recorded a whole bunch of short dives. Relatively cumbersome to get them out of the Teric internal log....lots of button pushing to individually delete them. I'll just wear my regular divers watch next time. I hadn't been SCUBA for a couple of weeks before, so I can't add any value to what may have happened to tissue loading, but at those depths and durations, pretty sure it wouldn't be much.

 

[Outbound]

Good to know, David. I'll probably either avoid diving under while snorkeling or put it on my wife (who always stays at the surface) so we know what time it is but I don't get a bunch of dives that I have to manually delete from the internal log.