Scuba anyone?
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Thank you. I'm not that bothered with maintenance on a BCD, most of it I can do myself. In 22 years of regular diving, I've only needed to send a BCD away once, and in retrospect, I did not need to do that :-). Regs, now that is another matter. But with them, again, I don't get them serviced that often, 2 times I have sent them away, they have failed on the first dive post service. I look after my gear pretty well, and know if something isn't right pretty early on.
Also, I don't do anything extreme any longer. I think the deepest I have dived in the last 15 years is 35m, I can get up from there very safely on a lung full of air, and I'm not that bothered if I miss a safety stop....And I dive Nitrox, so there is a fairly shallow dive limit.
As I said to someone who was fussing over me in Indonesia, I've done 750 dives, and aint died yet....
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Nothing, but the guide at the resort seemed to assume I was a beginner and asked me what my air was every 5 minutes or so, it really pissed me off....
I know what my air is within plus or minus 5 bar at all times, I know if I am consuming a little too much because I am rooting around a little deeper that the others, that I need to shallow up to compensate, and I know that when I get to 5 meters, I can last for ever......
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The servicing is sometimes indeed a dice roll. During one of my first liveaboard safaris, we agreed with my diving buddy to do air sharing exercises. At 15m when we decided to do it, I got a mouth full of salt water. At the surface it was identified that the membrane was set backwards. After the service...
I bet that your trigger to go up is more about not getting into too much deco rather than the air consumption. -
I got rid of my Suunto computer because it was overly cautious. It locked me out one day because of something trivial, so I had to borrow a computer from the dive operation. I was not familiar with it and missed a deco stop. I had to do a 40 minute safety stop - I was not popular....
"OK face up to it - you're useless but generally pretty honest and straightforward . . . it's a rare combination of qualities that I have come to admire in you" - Geo 2011
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@Giles said in Scuba anyone?:
I got rid of my Suunto computer because it was overly cautious. It locked me out one day because of something trivial, so I had to borrow a computer from the dive operation. I was not familiar with it and missed a deco stop. I had to do a 40 minute safety stop - I was not popular....
The Suunto lock was notorious! I was diving under a constant fear of breaking the rules. The terror!!!
Now Im happy to announce that on top of, reduced gradient bubble model, they adapted Bühlmann 16 GF algorithm with GF
Those bastards went the Sharewatter way 5 months after I bought my Shearwater PERDIX 2. Felt almost robbed. But my daughter was a winner here as she got the computer and the air integration.For onlookers to this thread - the 16 stands for 16 types of tissues that this model takes under consideration base on their reaction to a changing pressure gradient, and the GF stands for Gradient Factors.
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I am afraid that I don't bother. All the dive operations we go to give us a printed readout of the dives we have done at the end of the week. Paula puts that is a plastic wallet with all the others. When I got my Shearwater, I set the dive count to my personal number of dives, so now that keeps track of my dive count. I did download the dives from my Shearwater the first time I used it, but that novelty soon wore off
But every dive I have done since I got it is stored in the memory, so I sort of have the last few 100..... -
I have to admit that I never bothered with a classic dive log. Usually I take a photo of the site map during briefing and I have computer log.
But as I was working on reducing my air consumption I got the habit of downloading the stats from the computer. It all started when the air integration came to market, I could finally just know my consumption at any time during the dive and it really informed the craft. Sharewater has now for half a year a new app that is kind of cool. But there is an app created by no other than creator of Linux himself - Linus Torvalds. Apparently he is an avid diver.
The app is called Subsurface. This is the end game, funny how all the commercial apps created by professional companies are not even close to this one. -
That is an interesting point about air consumption. Working on reducing it, will be a big part of my diving for a while. The XDeep Ghost which arrived whilst I was in Japan, is the first part of the jigsaw, learning how to frog kick properly is another.
In Raja Ampat last time, my group (of 4) included a girl called Cat. I had been diving with her before, but we had never dived in the same small group, so I had not studied how she dived in detail underwater. She frog kicked, was always perfectly horizontal and never used her hands to turn (I do). She dives with her hands held way forward of her torso, I think to move some weight forwards of her pivot pint to help with trim control. I am not awful with air consumption, but she would regularly come up after an hour with twice as much air as me. She is tiny, so I am sure that helped, but that holiday made me realise I have a lot to get better at.
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If I had to quantify what gave me most air saving, I would say frog kicking.
It’s just such a reduction in how many muscles are propelling you forward. And I also realised how much the normal kick was fucking up my buoyancy. It always has some sort of force pushing you up, it’s impossible to have neutral buoyancy.
And at this point I don’t even get more force from normal way, the frog kicking is all I need no matter how hard is the current.
🥳
