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Accidently using the wrong mix is why IANTD insists you should analyze your mix right before diving it. I cringed at spending $300 for an analyzer when I could buy another regulator for that, but it was worth it for peace of mind, and because it's impossible to mix your own safely unless you have one. I personally never use nitrox for extended bottom time, but do use it with air tables for a safety margin when doing repetitive gorrila dives. For example, I did an NSS-CDS full cave course in Florida a few months ago in six days (normal is eight, but we all were experienced wreck divers, so the instructor felt comfortable squeezing all the dives into this amount of time), and we did all dives on nitrox. Including some "fun" night dives during the course and some diving after the course, I did something like 25 dives in seven days, all but a few being decompression dives by the air tables. My Aladin Pro was getting up past 20 hrs of desaturation time by the end of the week, but none of us felt the general sense of fatigue that seems to come with several days of repetitive deco diving on air. I should note here that we were mixing and analyzing our own gas - paying for that many premix fills at $25 per set of doubles would have been prohibitive. Aside from cost, the other main reason more experienced Northeast wreck divers don't use nitrox is not operational complexity, but rather that shops insist that tanks be O2 cleaned and marked before they will fill them. While that is certainly a good, conservative approach, it means that the tanks can then no longer be filled from any old compressor, and must be brought to a shop which pumps either nitrox or oil-free air. Unfortunately, there aren't many of these around yet. John jheimann@sc*.gt*.co*
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