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> Personally I believe that in the next 5 years adding helium will grow to 
> be as popular as nitrox is today.

Yeah, but get the training agencies to accept this...

Where is the basic heliox/mix course?

I posed this question to one of the training agencies 
recently.  I suggested that heliox, trimix wasn't
rocket science and had some obvious benefits, especially
over air for 100-150' wreck dives (for others as well,
this was just my example).  I suggested that the
current courses (many being multiple days) were totally 
overbloated for someone who is doing these dives on 
single/doubles on air, and simply wanted to switch to 
mix using pre-cut or custom-cut tables.

I figured at worst they might acknowledge that at least
teaching this type of mix would help them do this type
of dive much safer, and the teaching wouldn't need be
that mush more strenuous than nitrox coursework.  After
all the divers are doing these dives NOW on AIR.. why
not teach them to do them "better"?

The answer I got was not encouraging.

The agencies (if for naught else than CYA motives) want
to keep this as the brass ring, inserting hoop after
hoop to get the mix card.

You can scream about how "easy" and "simple" it would
be for people to do these dives "right"... but the agencies
aren't there to support it.  And while you can homebrew,
and teach yourself without too much trouble, that option 
makes it a lot less accessible than being able to run 
down to a local shop that won't accept your XYZ Inc 
certification that you laminate yourself at Kinko's.
And certainly doesn't help ya when you are travelling even
if you do have a cool local shop.... It also ignores 
ecomonies of scale for renting the gas tanks, etc.

Mike
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