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You Yanks really crack me up. This nitrox business of yours is showing up everywhere in the UK. Dive charters are looking more like Labor party rallies with all of these silly stickers and such pasted on tanks and car bumpers. The biggest acronym of them all, IANTD, just recently staged a sizeable convention with all sorts of technical diving luminaries present. Looks to me like the big lie has sucked in all of the really big fish. When the facts finally become known on this foolishness the scene will be reminiscent of the Nuremberg trials with everyone pointing their fingers at the next higher up while claiming complete innocence and total ignorance. When the dust settles this poor bloke Rutkowski, who supposedly invented all of this stuff, will be the fall guy for the cadre of world experts. I can just picture him now, all red faced and sitting in the dock, with his solicitor purporting that it really was a divine (but erroneous) inspiration and pleading for the courts mercy. I was in the chemist yesterday and I couldn�t help but notice that almost one entire aisle of the store was devoted to antioxidant vitamins. Let�s see: there were all sorts of vitamin Cs, vitamin Es, vitamin A , B complexes, pynxogenol, mineral supplements and to top it all off hormones like melatonin which spposedly has mega antioxidant powers. In fact the whole thrust of the anti cancer and anti aging crusade seems to be oriented around the power of antioxidants in preventing free radicals from damaging connective tissue and DNA. Many physicians now agree that colon cancer as well as arteriosclerosis are preventable through a proper diet, high in antioxidants. When this as a backdrop why on earth would anyone in their right mind voluntarily expose themselves to a ultra hyperoxic breathing mix unless it was absolutely necessary. I would love one of you Yank diving rocket scientists out there to tell me that oxygen is not an oxidizer if you breath it (while you busily oxygen clean tanks and replace buna o-rings with Viton). Instead of boosting the oxygen content of the breathing gas I would lower it and replace it instead with an inert gas such as helium. Nitrox I should really be 12 - 14% helium and 19% oxygen. Nitrox II should be slightly higher helium and lower oxygen still. I am not advocating this for deep diving either (Deep diving for me is another whole subject). This is strictly my suggestion for a physiologically more healthy mix. Helium is a very rapid diffusing gas and transits the tissue rather quickly for low to moderate exposure dives. Weigh the advantages: reduced ppo2, reduced ppn2 (bad for those red blood cells and capillaries) and reduced deco (if you don�t have a pfo). Helium is bloody expensive in the UK and Oz, but when you keep the mix to 10 -14% on an 80cf tank you can get as many as 30 dives out of a 290-300cf cylinder of helium when you cascade several. Even at $200 U.S. per cylinder this works out to 6 - $10 additional cost per dive. Big deal! Look what dive charters cost these days and with the weather in the UK being typically bad all of the time, how many weekends of diving do you actually get anyway. We spend more on petrol driving to the port of embarkation. On one final note. I am new to this list but I have been following some of the traffic on cavers and over on Compuserve. This chap of yours, Irving, who I believe is director of a project with a name like the call letters of a radio station, seems to have this figured out way ahead of the rest of you Yanks. I noticed, while following the thread on deep air, that Irving dives shallow in the ocean with weak helium and reduced oxygen mixes. I also couldn�t help but notice that his group uses very low ppo2 trimixes for their deep dives and is using reduced nitrogen/o2 mixes for intermediate deco. Irving also said somewhere that he only uses nitrox when it is absolutely necessary and not otherwise. When the truth comes out on this nitrox business you are going to see a lot of bumper stickers and dive shop front doors with the IEC verboten symbol (red circle with a hash) over the nitrox. Cheers, Nigel Chase --------------------------------------------------------- Get Your *Web-Based* Free Email at http://www.hotmail.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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