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Bob, I like to keep the heat on these guys since they do it to anyone they feel superior to - watch them, you will see. I should ease up - you have a great style. The scientific guys always hate to draw conclusions, but we just have to go with something. David Elliott told me a story about having a guy down 1500 feet with he and Dr Bulhman in charge. As they strted to bring the diver up, he went into convulsions due to HPNS. Normally, one would think that relief from the pressure would solve this, but it got worse, so Elliott sent him back down, to 1800 feet, and the symptoms subsided. Then they worked him back up. The lesson - ask the guys who do it, not the ones who don't. Another great story - Elliott told me he and Bulhman had another one down real deep and on the way up the diver got severe DCS symptoms , while still deep. Bulhman said it should not be based on the tables, everything should be ok based on the formula. But it was not. Elliot used to be the chief medical officer for Shell UK, and edited "Physiology and Medicine of Diving" with Peter Bennett. I think Elliott is medical advisor to the European Diving Union now. He got his experience (the part we use) when Shell Oil started drilling and diving in the North Sea. He told me , "Don't worry about what you don't know, worry about what you think you know that may not be right". So we do it, log it, check it ask the pros about it, and do it again, but we are ready for anything, and we don't need any of our edge lost to stupidity, like being out of shape, using drugs, or otherwise dispalying sypmtoms of being a personal preferencer when it comes to our lives. on these subjects he told me, "I don't know the answer, but it can't hurt". We have logged a few thousand man hours of extreme mixed-gas diving and the results thereof. We also have all of the distance records other than the one Oliver Isler has, and we have all of the distance at depth records and regularly do the most complex gas diving profiles ever. We see the results of wrong mix, wrong deco, wrong condition, wrong attitude, wrong gear. These we call funerals, and we have been to a few. When I asked David Elliot to look over our entire dive planning procedure, he came back with two suggestions: 1) have somebody who is not going on the dive look over the plan and critique it (we now have risk analysts on our team for this purpose), and 2) use full face masks for the O2 leg (which we now make available in the water on the O2 bottles). - G
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