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Pete, you don't need "experience" to dive helium - you need common sense. The only mystery with helium is to the dive instructors who are too stupid to understand it. The funny part is that there is nothing to understand. If you go to the hospital and have surgery or have any respiratory issues , they put you on heliox. Do you think they check for a "C" card first? Helium is an obviously superior choice as a breathing gas. Sometime in the first or second grade, we learn how much oxygen and nitrogen is in the atmosphere, and what it takes to keep us alive. Unfortunately, most dive instructors don't make it that far. PADI OW 1 teaches what partial pressure is. Air is the hardest gas , if not impossible, to decompress from. Helium based mixtures, especially heliox, are the most friendly gases for diving in every respect. -----Original Message----- From: petesfscuba@me*.co*.za* [mailto:petesfscuba@me*.co*.za*] Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 4:05 AM To: techdiver@aquanaut.com Cc: "nztechdivers@yahoogroups??????????????????? Subject: RE: Was Single or Doubles, now amount of dives The dogmatic insistance on a big dive log to start using helium seems to be based on the assumption that anyone using helium wants to dive deeper than 40m (or 60m if they punt deep air). I got really frustrated with this because I wanted to use helium in the 30-40m range (100-133ft). Because there is no training agency here that trains Normoxic Trimix below 75 dives (CMAS-ISA) (IANTD=100), and I couldn't get He fills anywhere in South Africa until I could wave the C-card around, I have had to stay above 30m to build up the dives. Sadly, this is counter productive, because we have such a dominant deep-air contingent here in SA. If helium were introduced much earlier and based on objective skill criteria (e.g. when bouyancy is sufficiently mastered), and not number-of-dives, it would stand a better chance of getting away from the voodoo gas stigma, and be more competently used. IANTD and other "tech" training agencies probably find number-of-dives an easy measure of experience, which would apply to any diving beyond the dead simple and lowest risk "recreational". The question then becomes: "why deny recreational Helium?". ...because it is still seen as voodoo gas and "everyone" is scared of it for shallow diving... Maybe this view will shift over time, as the use of He in shallow dives gains more public exposure as DIR grows. Efforts by you(Trey)and the WKPP guys, and GUE to get people to understand the benefits of DIR have gone a long way to making these changes. The DIR-UK guys and the DIR New Zealand group have been doing great work at getting DIR seen by the wider diving community, through practical demonstrations, exhibitions & club visits. If we keep up the effort, practical DIR wisdom will soon become evident to everyone. Pete. -----Original Message----- From: George Irvine [mailto:girvine@be*.ne*] Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 3:03 AM To: Dogtrner1@ao*.co*; techdiver@aquanaut.com Subject: RE: Was Single or Doubles, now amount of dives Karla, any trimix requires no dives. What kind of drooling moron would tell somebody they need to do 200 air dives before they could dive the correct gas? ------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using MetroWEB's WebMail service. http://www.metroweb.co.za/ - full access at only R49.95 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: quest-unsubscribe@gu*.co* For additional commands, e-mail: quest-help@gu*.co* -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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