NDAC DEEP AIR - 17th October 2009

Many people in the "NEW TEC" diving circles see deep air as plain stupid and you should not be allowed to dive every again...... This is complete bull and deep air can teach you a lot about yourself and what happens to you at depth.

Imagine that you are on a deep OC trimix dive and you have a free flow at max depth your mate has his head stick in the wreck digging for gold. You shut down look around and your mate "buddy" is no longer there...... you start to ascend so you can get on your first deco mix at the deepest possible depth this means you will end up having a bigger EAD jump than you planed for. As soon as you that that first breath on the reg you get hit with the gas change and you head goes all over the place... Now you have done many deep air dives so you know your narked but you feel ok with it and start going up again to the next stop point until your good. Image what it would feel like if you have never done a deep air dive and how you would react to it....

Anyway back to NDAC....... All the other nuts were busy this weekend so it was down to Me and Geoff to get wet on Saturday. I have done my far share of deep air dives and in many ways was not looking to forward to it, I love helium to much now!!!! But Geoff wanted to hit the 60m mark so that was the plan.

Back gas was Air, 1st Deco was 32% and 2nd Deco was 100%. Max depth was set at 65m with a max run time of 1hr.

The plan was made with a 10min bottom time. Several trips down to the deep end of the pontoon with the twins and stages (bring on the CCR's). When doing this sort of diving i like to take my time kiting up I dropped in and the water was cold it said 14deg on the computers but felt like 6deg. Geoff jumped in and soon found a good size leak on his dry gloves we decided that he would be best getting his wet gloves from the car so i stayed in the water while he went off to get them.....

On his return we dropped down the 45m pontoon line to the edge of the shelf. At around 40m i noticed the narks kicking in and the normal metal tast in my mouth... Geoff looked good and we carried on down 62.5m was our end depth to ensure we had hit the 60m mark, we had 4 computers between us all reading from 61 to 62.5m. We ended up with about a 10min bottom time and just the right amount of deco for how cold it was.... The deco came and went with out any issues and we both had a good dive......