Medical Mick on Nitrox and Mixed Gas

Ok I guess its about time to come out and admit it, NO not that, "that" would be the subject of an altogether different web site.

The thing is that for some time my mind has been telling my body that its 25,well actually probably since I was 25!. I am actually double that and a bit more, and that’s as far as I am taking that!

This results in my mind writing out cheques that sometimes my body has trouble cashing, resulting in spectacular sports injuries.

Diving is of course much the same, you may think it is not that energetic a sport when you are floating with perfect buoyancy (well that’s if you have done a BSAC course) but the average dive burns around 600 calories, and judging by the sights of some visiting divers that I see here, that may help, wives and girlfriends struggling to get their man in a rubber suit round a expanding waistline, tying two weight belts together to get round but hang on that sounds like a scene from something that Max Mosley allegedly may have been involved in.

So someone suggested to me that at my age I shouldn't be diving on air, in fact that it should only go in my car tyres, and that I should be diving on Nitrox,I don’t think it had anything to do with the fact that he was selling the course!! So I completed the course, and now do a lot of my diving on 32% nitrox, I have to say for me it has worked, it may not for everyone, but during the dive I feel more alert, and afterwards do not feel the need to curl up for a few hours on a sun bed. There is the reduced risk of DCS, but it is vital to monitor depth closely to avoid a build up of O2 toxicity.

The one thing I would challenge is that I did my course over a period of 5 days, not because I was thick, but because that was considered right for the amount of learning, so it does concern me how the dive schools are doing it in half a day now.

I have since gone one stage further and completed my advanced Nitrox, advanced Tri mix and decompression management course, this was courtesy of Simon and Des at the Dive Shop Matagorda Lanzarote. Well actually it wasn’t, I paid for it, or rather my good friends Clive and Julia Latham, and their friend Paul, who all run a great dive school in Kent, England called T2S (Time to Scuba) paid for me this in return for putting them up when they came to Lanzarote (that should get me some free diving if I was ever daft enough to go back to the UK!)

So the course, it’s advantages and disadvantages. First its just occurred to me - Simon and Des, if you put them in bowler hats and moustaches they would be dead ringers for Laurel and Hardy!

This is no easy course and that is how it should be, the classroom work is fairly hard, if like me it is a long time since you have been at school! It is a pretty steep learning curve, going back to basics then building from there. Some of the formulas are mind blowing, but Simon, it has to be said, is a brilliant and tolerant teacher.

The dives, now I am still not sure if this was a wind up or not, but I had to do skills that I had not done in the water for 20 odd years! And some more I had not heard of.

The fascinating thing is to do a dive one day on air to 45mtrs, and then the next day the same dive on tri mix,you may think that on air you do not have Narcosis at that depth, this convinces you otherwise!

Without getting complicated on mixes, at 45 mtrs on trimix, the equivalent, narcotic depth is only 24mtrs

The disadvantages, you have to carry a fair bit of kit, like a side slung cylinder with a high O2 content for accelerated deco and Helium is a strange gas, it sucks a lot of body heat out of you, and lastly you may sound like Joe Pasquale for a while!!