Mark

Having had the description of your dive read to me over the phone I would
like to offer the following comments:

1. First the dive sounded like the biggest screw up I have ever seen
published. You were obviously out of it, lets see blind, overinflation of BC
to the point of rupturing the bladder, estimates of 130 meter/min ascent
rate due to loss of buoyancy control. etc etc.

2. It sounds like you are damn lucky to be alive and that if anything this
should have taught you the reason to avoid ultra deep air divers rather than
have a desire to teach it to 70 meters.

3. That your mental frame of mind as to the approach to do deep dives is
outdated by 30 years or so and numerous deaths are proof of this outdated
mind set

4. You must be unaware that IANTD only offers air diving courses to a max
depth of 51 meters and that a sister program to this course is Normoxic
Trimix
which is essentially the same program except all divers deeper than 40
meters are made on trimix and it will allow dives to 60 m. With your goal to
teach deep air to 70 + meters you certainly do not need an affiliation with
IANTD where this practice is expressively FORBIDDEN

5. After completing the dive you did and still wish to promote this type of
activity as such you would represent everything IANTD is trying to
discourage and avoid, thus you crossing over to IANTD is a little absurd.

6.  While if you had learned from this experience and god knows you had some
good clues dropped to you on the dangers of this type of activity
A. Blind at 100 m (but you continued the dive to 158m) time for a sanity
check,
B. explosive ascent due to loss of control for whatever reason
C. The need to do a omitted deco procedure because you could not recover
your buoyancy on the dive and various other comments you made concerning the
dive.

As stated if you had learned instead of being intrigued by that dive, you
may have had good rational to share with divers about avoiding ultra deep
air diving but it seems your primary goal is to teach air diving to depths
that exceed accepted oxygen and nitrogen limits, Sorry that is something
that will not be done under the IANTD umbrella. I recommend you stick with
your present training agencies maybe they will allow this but we will not.

7. While I agree with your statement on the rights of an individual to take
risk on a personal level I cannot share your enthusiasm about wanting to
encourage others to do this type (ultra deep air)activity. Plus I find it
difficult to see your logic in wishing to do a 158 m air dive in the first
place when there are other ways to have adventure and take risk that are not
proven both in theory and in practice physiologically insane endeavors.

8.All you proved is for some reason on this one day, you as one person,
survived a dive to 158 m. I hope you at least picked up enough warnings from
the events that happened to you to avoid this kind of a dive in the future.

9. Deep diving even on propre mixes has its share of danger why try to
exceed well documented physiological risk limits.

10. In closing while my philosophy agrees with a statement by Dr Gil Milner
along time ago.

“You Have The Obligation to Inform One Honestly of the Risk, And As a Person
You Are Committed to Educate Yourself to the Total Risk In Any Activity!”
“Once Informed & Totally Aware of the Risk, Every Fool Has the Right to Kill
or Injure Themselves as They See Fit!”

So if you really understand and accept the risk then you have the right to
kill yourself, but Mark we do not want you to be responsible for training
IANTD divers if you feel ultra deep air diving is something you want to
promote and teach them. So as long as your stated goal is to teach air to
great depths,
then we really would prefer that you were not an IANTD instructor

So I do not know at what part of your instructor crossover you are at or who
with but I will have to prevent its completion at this time maybe when and
if you "grow up we can reconsider this action".

Respectfully yours,
Tom Mount
CEO IANTD World HQ
http://www.iantd.com

-----Original Message-----
From: bdi@wh*.ne* <bdi@wh*.ne*>
To: Tom Mount <TOM.MOUNT@wo*.at*.ne*>
Cc: techdiver@aquanaut.com <techdiver@aquanaut.com>; Christian Gerzner
<christiang@pi*.co*.au*>; Mark the Nark Andrews
<extreme@de*.fr*.co*.uk*>
Date: Tuesday, August 17, 1999 11:46 PM
Subject: Re: Darwin Award winner -'Mark the Nark'Andrews




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