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first i gotta tell ya.. open circuit sucks.. when i am the one diving the scuba stuff i hate it now, we owe rich for not rubbing it in for the last year, guess you wouldn't know unless you were diving it tho. there is so much noise you wont believe it. and the bouyancy changes.. drives you nuts. tonite i used the pyle hypercapnia test.. i removed the scrubber canister and walked around the house to see what it was like.. the results were pretty good i guess.. i had 60% in the bottle, havent tested what's in the breathing bag yet cuz both of my analizers are on loan, (i would expect about 30% tho), will do that tomorrow.. i rode the stationary bike and worked out on the universal, did some push ups and walked up and down the steps (my house has three stories). i didn't notice any thing for about ten minutes, then i felt really good for about three minutes, not like narcosis, but good. then i could tell my respriation was going up, for the next seven minutes i tried to deal with the feeling that i was not getting enough oxygen.. it's not like the feeling you get when you're at 200fsw on air and have to swim against the current, this i can work out.. slow my breathing and it goes away.. the feeling tonite did not go away, no matter what i did.. i kept feeling more and more like i was going to suffocate, even when i was looking at myself in the mirror and breathing normally. finally after 20 minutes i gave up.. one of the strange things my mind did was to get nervous, i felt like i was at depth, but then i remembered that all i had to do was remove the mouthpiece and i could breathe, this gave me about three more minutes but not much.. i would hate to be under water when this happened.. i agree 100% with joel and rich that the only option would be to bail out on oc. after i went off the loop and called rich, even ten minutes later my mind was not working clearly (no shitty comments please).. i could not reason properly. i will do this a few more times to get used to it, and i think it wouldn't be too bad an idea to do it on a regular basis as a precautionary measure. it has been almost an hour and my head still hurts from the co2. at the end of the test i felt a little sick but not too bad. rich was saying that 20 minutes was pretty good, due to the fact that the unit is semi close and has a constant flow, purging some of the co2 on a regular basis. one of the other interesting things i learned from rich today was that the co2 loading is related to the rate of production more than the limit of the canister.. uh, that is to say that if you are under stress or working hard the canister, when it's new, will handle the load, but as you load up the absorbent it's ability to handle heavy loads decreases. therefore when you reach the limit of your canister you arent forced from the water on the spot, you just have to slow your work load or production of co2. i dont think this means to push it, just that the world doesn't end when you reach that point. i was speaking with a owner of a 15.5 today and he told me a story about a time when he pushed his canister past it's limit, he was at 70 feet and could feel the hypercapnia coming on, instead of aborting and using his oc bail out he decided to work it out and swim back to the boat. I was thinking this was foolish, but now i see how one could slow everyting down and get some more time. he did admit to having a headache for a day afterward. i also see an advantage to a semiclosed system in that a portion of the co2 is exhausted regularly. more to come. dp
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