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OK enough of this shilly shallying around. Let's get our act together on narcosis. If you expose your self to hyperbaric nitrogen, you are impaired. There are *no* two ways about it. Stop giving this bollocks about I get narced at X, you get narced at Y. That narcosis can be *measured* at 15m, especially with novel tasks such as might be encountered during an emergency. We're alive because we consider emergencies, not the boring bit where everything works. What a lot of you seem to be wiffling on about is *subjective* narcosis. If you want to experience some of the variation in subjective narcosis, hit different dive sites. One day you'll be fine and dandy at 178 feet, having a whale of a time. The other you'll be hysterically terrified at 156 feet. I consider myself lucky to be self aware enough to pick up the symptoms at 100 feet every time. The point is that no matter how you feel, you are impaired. Now your experience with the routine tasks of diving (and given the experience of some of the people crapping on here, most of the emergency routines as well) will help when your anasthetic sodden body has to actually do something rather than floating. But at the end of the day it is not doing it as well it should. Now there's a cost-benefit analysis going on here. I know I'm impaired at depth, so I don't take on such serious bottom tasks as I would shallower. Everyone does that analysis differently, and it's based on bucks as much as anything else. The problem is that people have got into the habit of doing their analysis underwater, when they're already impaired; too late. So stop doing this, I'm good to 180, crap. You aren't. You *can* dive deep on air. But don't think you're good down there. Even if you're feeling great you're fucked. So what's my final solution? Hey I'm young and immortal and it won't happen to me. I want to see a few things that are beyond my range right now, and I'm going to work up to them. And when I'm rich and a few thousand quid means less than it does now, the cost benefit will swing the other way, and I'll be breathing heliox (and *no* there will be no nitrogen in sight), to do stuff I'm doing now. Whether or not you're narced is *not* a variable. You are. Whether or not you should make the dive *is* a variable; it's utterly subjective. Post us a few hard facts. Stop treating each other like cretins. Sorry about all this. Hangover. Jason
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