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> As far as I am aware not one of you DIR big guns has ever come up > Northeast to dive... JJ came up there a couple of years ago for a week of diving on the Doria. I don't recall him saying anything about DIR principles not working for those dives, or making any major changes to his gear config as a result of those dives. If you want, I will ask him about the next time I see him. > DIR can be a place to EVOLVE to, should your brain pan and type of > diving require it, but not all diving will or does...... For the record, I have used DIR gear config in the following environments - Bahamas, Cayman islands, Florida Keys, Florida Gold Coast, NC wrecks, California kelp, plus freshwater lakes, quarries and springs. Obviously I have not dove everywhere, but I have used DIR in a variety of locations, and have not found ONE PLACE where it does not work. > it also seems to me that DIR is or should be about a hell of a lot > more than gear and cards... It is. And if you think that DIR is only about gear, then it is obvious that you do not understand it. > a post a while back mentioned that somone took the trimix course so > that they could feel comfortable at 130 ft.....excuse me???isn't the > cart before the horse here? Shouldn't they feel comfortable at 130 > before taking the mix course..... Not necessarily. I have done one dive ever to deeper than 130 feet - it was two years ago in Wakulla springs, diving support for WKPP (this was back when support divers were still diving air). After that dive, I swore I would never dive deeper than 130 feet again unless I was on mix. And lately I have been backing that number down closer to 100 feet. Now that WKPP is requiring trimix for exposure dives deeper than 100 feet, I am interested in some of the deep support tasks. Before that, I never was. My opinion (borne from experience) is that if you are below 100 feet on air, then you are fucked up - no question about it. And if you are routinely doing task-oriented exposure dives at depths of deeper than 100 feet, then you need to be doing those dives on mix. > it seems to me that people are loading up on gear and pretty big > concepts way before they are capable of handling them......... This statement makes it fairly obvious that you have come under the influence of strokes. If you are taught the Right Way, by the Right People, then by the time you are ready to go deeper than 130, you WILL have the concepts down and WILL be capable of handling them. The biggest problem right now with the dive industry (and by extension, the instructors who work in it) is that as a group, they are obsessed with "going deep". Students are pushed into taking courses that will lead to their doing deeper and deeper dives, without getting the necessary experience at their current levels of certification. The student divers need to be taught to build up their water skills in shallower environments before proceeding to more challenging dives. I personally cannot think of a better environment to prepare for trimix diving than in caves. You get exposure to all the correct gear, use of mixed gasses, stage bottles, long decompressions, etc. The problem is that people want to bypass all of that and go straight from Basic Nitrox to Master Deep Technical Trimix Wreck Penetration Diver. And if you have the cash, the industry will happily provide you with the means for what amounts to a form of assisted suicide. > it seems that people are making the mistaken assumption that all this > particular gear with just this particular setup will miraculously > render them somehow safer than those godless heathen strokes..... See my previous point about not understanding DIR. Those people clearly "just don't get it." -JimG -- Jim Greenlee (jkg@cc*.ga*.ed*) "Can you destroy the Earth?" Instructor, College of Computing "Egad, I hope not! That's Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332 where I keep all my stuff!" -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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