Mailing List Archive

Mailing List: techdiver

Message Display

  scuba <scuba@uc*.be*.ed*> wrote on Fri 5 Aug 1994 23:54:41 -0700
(Subject: Bent fish, terrorist dolphins & human evolution...):-

  > ... Suunto dive computer on some of the untrained Miskito Indian lobster
divers ... typical profile ... 3 dives.  198 ft for 43 mins, [then] 100 ft for
80 mins, [then] 103 ft for 20 mins [6 tanks used with no decomp stops]....
then ... lunch break [and similarly in the afternoon]. ... he should be dead
... The resistance is believed to be due to a blood protein that protects them
from the immediate symptoms of DCS. ...

  I read in a reader's letter to a UK sport diving magazine a theory that
"bends bubbles tend to form around the small blood cells called platelets, and
that during steady diving this process with `silent bubbles' keeps the blood
clean of platelets as fast as platelets form, but if he stops diving for a
while and the blood gets a platelet load he is more liable to serious bends in
his first few dives after resuming diving".

  > ... They are mostly illiterate and poor and have absolutly no knowledge of
diving physics. They believe that their pain and suffering is due to mermaids
seeing them and cursing them while they are diving. ...

  If they are superstitious to the point of believing in mermaids when adult,
can't they be persuaded to write into their tribal beliefs something
resembling good decompression and diving practise? An example, although
jocular, that I have read of, was where someone training naval rebreather
divers in UK or USA once invented a fictional sea-spirit named Oxygen Pete who
caused oxygen poisoning and was the alleged author of some naval diving manual
etc rules; this persisted, and even now some naval divers say `I got a Pete'
for `I had oxygen poisoning'.

  That sort of deep long-duration work diver sounds like the sort of diver who
may benefit from automatic closed-circuit nitrox sets, <<<when and
if>>> they
are ever made reasonably cheap and <<<completely reliable>>>.

  Are they earning enough to buy replacement equipment and compressors when
what they are using now wears out?

Navigate by Author: [Previous] [Next] [Author Search Index]
Navigate by Subject: [Previous] [Next] [Subject Search Index]

[Send Reply] [Send Message with New Topic]

[Search Selection] [Mailing List Home] [Home]