Bill, I used to really respect deep air divers - for leaving me all the
cave. Read my story about going back in Indian Springs Cave with Casey
McKinlay to survey Exley's air line - everyone thought the cave was
"walled out" in what Exley had called the "Wakulla Room". 

When Casey and I got to the end, I got out my tools (not those, my
survey tools)  and got ready to survey. There was a huge rock where
Exley had wrapped the line about fifty times around and just dropped the
reel on top. Exley had told me it was walled out, and Gavin and Parker
had gone there the day Parker got killed on a "weak" trimix ( before we
set PPN2 standards) and had added line in a side tunnel that went
noplace, and came back thinking the cave was walled out .

 When Casey passed me his wetnotes with the message, "Looks good , give
me the reel", I thought he was kidding ( I had not even looked up from
the rock yet), so I handed him Exley's horrifying reel and started
laughing. He unclipped the Gavin reel from my hip, tied in , and hit the
trigger. 

 A few minutes later we had dumped that 1000 feet of line and now had
about five choices of hot cave to explore that took us all a few more
months of diving to enjoy. 

 I love air divers, they always leave me the good stuff, and Exley, as
we all know , was "good on air" , like this guy Hess - he died proving
it....

Bill Wolk wrote:
> 
> On12/21/99 6:36 PM, Mike Rodriguez wrote:
> 
> >It's well known that divers can build a tolerance to narcosis,
> >but they are still impaired when under high PN2s.  While this
> >may not be life-threatening when everything is going well, it
> >*is* life-threatening when things are going badly.
> 
> Mike -
> 
> I want to clear up this statement before someone misinterprets it:
> 
> Divers *CANNOT* build up a safe tolerance to nitrogen narcosis. A diver
> can overlearn tasks so that a relatively narrow set of skills can be
> performed adequately when impaired -- that's what deep air divers think
> is "tolerance" -- but when an event occurs outside of the norm, the
> entire decision making loop breaks down -- potentially dangerously.
> 
> I have no doubt Peter Hess has made many productive dives to the Monitor
> over the years; the point that deep air junkies don't seem to understand
> is that the same dives can be made much more safely and would have been
> far more productive on mix.
> 
> Best regards --
> 
> Bill
> 
> --
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