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SEE THOSE GOALPOSTS SHIFT
STEVE WEINMAN, EDITOR
"I'M THINKING OF GETTING INTO THIS TECHNICAL DIVING LARK," said a friend recently. A well-known UK diver from way back, he had always been content to dive as he first learnt to do it. Most of his diving now takes place abroad, but I assumed that he had developed an interest in visiting deeper wrecks than he could safely manage on air.
I asked if this was the case. "No, I'm talking about nitrox," he said. "It's available everywhere abroad these days, and it just gives you that extra margin of safety on routine dives."
"Technical" diving? The conversation served to remind me that, for some people, nitrox is still seen, if not as a dark art, at least as more than a simple precautionary boosting of the oxygen content of air.
Yet outside the UK, certain dive schools have successfully introduced a basic nitrox qualification as an element in their training of PADI Open Water Divers. After all, for the majority of divers who are happy to stay within the 30m recreational limit, what's the big deal about breathing nitrox 32 as opposed to nitrox 21?
In fact, what's happening is that these new divers are paying upfront to get free nitrox fills in the future. In many parts of the world, nitrox is the new air and no-one thinks twice about it. Nothing could be further from technical diving.
Are we being left behind? We raised the issue of learning on nitrox in Big Question a few months ago, and more than three-quarters of you considered it a bad idea, a case of too much information too soon. There will likely be those in the trade who prefer to maintain the status quo, too. So we sent John Bantin to the Red Sea to find out just how significant these developments really are.
Nitrox is just a matter of simple maths, and perhaps we underestimate the capacity of humans to manage the tasks set them. This month's news pages certainly reflect some remarkable human achievements.
A few years ago, we got excited when the late John Bennett became the first recreational scuba diver to plunge to 1000ft and come back. But within three weeks of each other, two technical divers claim to have reached considerably greater depths. The floodgates are open.
I wrote recently about the difficulty of verifying such dives, and there was initially some debate about Frenchman Pascal Bernabe's new 330m record. Whatever the exact depth, it was very deep.
Similarly, Patrick Musimu's incredible freedive to 210m was made outside the auspices of governing body AIDA. But instead of following the usual sponsorship-friendly practice of whittling away at records a metre or two at a time, Musimu dived almost 40m below the deepest AIDA level, using a revolutionary equalisation technique.
Beginners learning to use nitrox without thinking about it; advanced divers reaching incredible depths without apparent medical repercussions. That's what makes diving so amazing - you never dare take anything for granted.
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