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Dear Fellow Divers, Some of what of I have read on this and the cavers list over the past few days has got me really concerned. You see I just completed my IANTD mixed gas certification and I recently obtained my full cave from a local instructor here in the Tampa area. For the past several years I have been planning to join the WKPP and put my gas training to good use, but now I am having major second thoughts about this course of action. Some people would term me as being "robust". I am a fairly big guy and weigh in around 290 @ 5�11", but this doesn�t impair my athletic interests which include golf, fishing and handball. My IANTD instructor recommended that I purchase Pro-Planner and I have been generating lots of tables for some of the dives I am anticipating having to do with the WKPP. I confirmed most of these calculations with a bootleg copy of Decom that one of the guys in my mix course gave me and feel that the deco should be no problem until I read some of last weeks posts. I did several training dives for my IANTD mix course on some deep wrecks out of Pompano with Ocean Diving. These were serious dives and had bottom times on the order of 35 to 45 minutes or so I thought. I figured that If wasn�t getting bent after doing 45 minutes at 250 then I would not get dcs on any of the big dives that WKPP does. After seeing that some of WKPP�s top divers were dropping out like flies at a raidfest I went back and recalculated my "big" dives with Ocean Diving. Fact of the matter was these dives that I thought were big were in fact more like 10 - 15 minutes or less of actual bottom time when you took into consideration the surface prep, descent and ascent time. Eee Gads!! What would happen when a guy like me, who�s carrying a little extra padding, does one of these dives in Wakulla. If George Irvine (I�ve seen him in his Doing it Right video and I find it hard to believe that he is really 50 years old, or so he claims) gets what he terms "slobitis" (tissue bubble damage to less vascularized abdominal fat with associated edema and swelling) on a "routine" dive of 45 - 100 minutes of real bottom time. What is my waistline going to look like after I step up and "pet the pony" as George terms it. As it is my charge account records reflect a few too many visits to the Big Man/Tall Man store. The bottom line is that I am a victim of a complete fraud perpetrated by IANTD and probably all of the other "tech diving" certification agencies (but I don�t know because I am not familiar with the details of their programs). They make "tech" diving seem like a walk in the park that anybody can learn to do, especially guys who are slightly challenged in the weight department, like myself. They hype up these deco programs and make us plan all of these big long dives, with figuring the gas mixes and CNS toxicity and equivalent breathing rates and all of the other bull and we ( I ) start feeling that gee whiz now I�m a big shot and can walk into these open water dive shops and throw around all of these "techno terms" and make some heads turn. I can just picture it now. I walk into my local dive shop after a big Wakulla dive and this is what probably will happen. "Ed, you look like you gained some weight and are in some serious pain, by the way how did the dives at Wakulla go and why are you all black and blue?" "It went great. Do you fellas want to buy some dive gear ? I�m going back to playing golf. Hows about a set of 104s and a transpac ? _____________________________________________________________________ Sent by RocketMail. Get your free e-mail at http://www.rocketmail.com -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send list subscription requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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