That old sat diver at the safety meeting shut me up real quick

I used to think those old school sat divers were just set in their ways, but this one guy Mike at a safety briefing in Houma last month said he'd rather pull a 12-hour bell run than deal with modern mixed gas computers. He showed me his logbook from the 80s with hand-calculated deco stops and no issues. Has anyone else had a crusty diver change their mind about old equipment?

2 comments

2 Comments

brian_murray20d ago

Hand calculated deco stops from the 80s, huh? Did he ever admit that the reason those dives worked out was because he was running super conservative tables, or did he just assume the computer would kill him? Because those old USN tables had a ton of padding built in, way more than any modern computer on a recreational setting.

nora_wells5820d ago

You mentioned "those old USN tables had a ton of padding built in" but doesn't that padding depend on what you're actually doing? Like, were those tables really that conservative for a multi-day repetitive dive trip or just for a single bounce dive? Because I've heard mixed things from old timers about how the padding worked out in practice on liveaboards. What kind of dives was he actually doing with those hand calculations?