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The "willies" is bullshit - reality it what is scary, and helium gives you just that - too much reality. Anyone who is doing ridiculous diving or chamber experiments SHOULD be concerned - very concerned. Anesthesizing them with nitrogen is not the answer. Helium and heliox require shorter , not longer decompressions. What the real story is that the "air" tables are all wrong, and should be longer than trimix ( all things being equal ) and in fact air should require the deeper stops that helium seems to ask for in the current "models" in use. The misconcpetion is then that high helium needs more deco. The more I have, the less I do. We use none of this, and have better success than anyone with decompression, especially me and Bill Mee who do the experimenting in the WKPP with the acclerated tables. I am getting my other knee done soon, and MRI'd and xrayed on Monday - we will see if I still have ZERO bone damage, as on my last scan two years ago. Since I just did an Iron Man triathelon last weekend, I would say my physical condition at 48 is unimpaired by my extreme diving, wouldn't you, and I do not do one second more of deco than is absolutely mandatory - it is just not necesasry. Ask our deco geeks what they have obvserved with me, Mee, Trout, Rose, JJ, Werner etc. for confirmation of this, and this is born out by doppler and blood tests, not supposition and bullshit. As for Jablonski's choice of gas for the Britannic or any other dive, it is a function of the availability of a booster pump only. I have no pump, I dive 65-70 helium and reduced total pressures. JJ has a pump here in the States and dives 90/10 in the cave, and has helium in all of his deco gases other than the oxygen, obviously. Since the general issues of liability out there falsely believe that more deco is better, everyone in diving tends to hesitate to recommmend real life deco like what we do. I suffer from no such constraints. If we could get helium to everyone at the high pressures, or if boosters were available to everyone, we would REQUIRE heliox for everything. Right now we just have a maximum "nitrogen equivalent depth" of 100 feet which is doable by everyone, and we mix for the deepest possible depth to be hit, not the average profile. This generally gives us a more workable "AED", but we know full well that heliox is on our wish list for the future when all the qas companies either have the HP supply tanks, or dive shops get boosters, or we figure out some other arangement that works for everyone. The CCR guys have no excuse for their turtle bone throwing guesswork other than ignorance and self-induced bullshit for using anything but heliox. Even Bill Stone knows that much and had his "divers" all using it at Wakulla. This may make it look bad since they got nothing done that we did not do on O/C and trimix, and actually took well over a month to get past what Exley put in on air, but that is a diffrent story and not a good example. The real story is that most of these CCR guys are weenies, and could not dive with any equipment including surface-supplied and boots. I have yet to see ANY of them do ANY dive that any WKPP diver could not do more effectively and faster on open circuit, including every dive done at Wakulla by the usdct. The CCR crowd on the "rebreather list" is not doing anything that could not be done on a single 80 in a bathing suit, in my opinion, and their decompresions are absurdly unsuccessful. Their chief savant, Rich "Wheelchair" Pyle, gets paralyzed on dives that worul not earn him a PADI O/W one certification, and they have a collection of Jerry Lewis Telethonites over there that need commercial fishing vessels to get them out of the water, and they are dispensing the "willie" and "deco" advice like they know something - they do not. Scott, it is real simple: 1) you need to be as clear as possible when diving - heliox gets that done, 2) you need a fast gas that does no damage of its own ( as nitrogen does ) and is actually inert - that is helium, and 3) you need to have no preconditions ) inluding excess adipose tissue ), you need good vacularization and perfusion ( i.e. good genetics), you need to be in good cardiovascular condition, and you need to be free of any injury or damage prior to diving, and you need to have no pulmonary reactions to these stresses, no blockage or swelling of any gas spaces, and you need to be armed with real information, not drooling bullshit like this "helium willes" nonsense. Only a goober like Richie Pyle would even say something like this. Where is that dope, anyway? I told him to stay out of K mart with that Cis Lunar. Now there is a guy who give me the "willies", and without any helium. Scott wrote: > > List, > > After talking with some of the RB nuts, I was asking them to explain > why they use trimix for diluent, instead of simple heliox. > The answer was to help reduce the "helium willies" or a nervous > feeling believed to be caused by lack of any nitrogen at all in the > breathing mix. Apparently, we are all a little narked at 1 atm, and > that level of narcosis is what we are used to operating under. > > Talking to the boss, who spent many hours in chambers living in heliox > atmosphere's, he said: > > "You always had the feeling that something was wrong, or was going to > go wrong, that you had no business being here, and that your body > wasn't ever meant to be under this kind of pressure, which is all > true! We would have really weird dreams while sleeping, and your mind > would just run away with different idea's and thoughts." > > We watched Andrew G's presentation on the GUE trip to the Britannic > last week. Thanks for sharing Andrew! (he had to holler over an NFL > game in the next room). He stated that the bottom mix for this dive > was 10/70. > > Was the nitrogen allowed in the mix to attenuate "helium willies" or > to help with deco, or some other reason I am not yet hip to? > > The Navy uses air or heliox, no trimix what so ever. Why the double > standard? > > I know from running different dives on tables and on ZPlan, that deco > can be drastically reduced by using trimix vs. heliox for most dives > of less than 2 hours duration. > > So, what's the deal? Why does helium, which is a smaller, lighter and > "friendlier" molecule cause increased deco obligations on shorter than > two hour dives? > > Scott -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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