TDI Advanced Nitrox and Deco Procedures

[FreediveWI]

I was going to stay out of this one.

Some people get really carried away with the "stroke" label and will call anyone who doesn't have all of their gear squared away 100%, exercise 3 hours a day, and only dive with a buddy, a stroke.

My defintion is a little more basic than that. Simply put, "an unsafe diver".

For me the number one thing is this, have they ever run out of air? Running out of air is such a simple, stupid, thing that I will never dive twice with someone who has run out of air on a dive with me.

I may have lost some friends in the past because I suddenly started declining every invivtation to dive off of their boat, but I will not get back into the water with them. I have even had them say "I didn't run out of air because you had extra air for me"! ???

I have also had people come up to share air with me because of regulator malfunctions. Thses people I would dive again with without a problem. Gear can fail and it's no one's fault, but running out of air because you don't know what your SAC rate is, if your a tec diver, or because you just don't watch your gauges is unacceptable.

THere are other things that I look for, like smoking, excessive drinking, lack of regular exercise for someone who want's to dive deep, hose stuffing, and getting bent on a semi-regular basis, but running out of air is the main one.

I will second Gert's other point about being able to show up on the dock and get paired with another DIR diver and have everything "click" on the dive after just meeting them.

It's so nice to have the exact same gasses, deco bottles, deco profiles, ingrained bail-out secenarios, and buddy awareness. There is no big discussion about what to do if a problem happens as both divers already know the drill and will respond in the SAME way. The deeper you go the more important this becomes.

DIR is a big topic that people like to bash around right now, but 10-12 years ago the same could be said about nitrox (the devil's gas ). I even quit working at one shop because they refused to let me mention the word on "their sales floor". Now everyone in town teaches it.

Most of the gear that recreational divers wear today came from the tec-diving/ cave-diving circles. THey were ALL hottly debated when they first came out but are now considered standard. Things like B.C.'s, Pressure gauges, power inflators, dive computers, octopus regulators all went through this process. So, for people to get all worked up and argue over it is just part of the growth of the sport. 10-12 years from now many of these things will be standard and we'll laugh about them - just like when I went through my basic diver course and wasn't allowed to use a power inflator or octopus because we had to "know" what to do when these things failed on us.

Jon