Archive for July, 2008
DCS, Diving and You
by admin on Jul.08, 2008, under Dive Trips
Here is a story on how safe divers, following the rules and diving within limits can still get a DCS hit . . .
Last weekend classifies as an adventure. Syd and I went on a dive trip to West Palm Beach Florida for a 4th of July weekend of diving we had scheduled a few months back and had been looking forward to. We drove to the Atlantic side starting out early Friday morning, and arrived at the Riviera Beach marina (just north of West Palm Beach) about noon, in the midst of a impressive thunderstorm, which by this time was mostly dissipating. The dive boat returned late from the morning trip and reported flat calm seas, excellent vis and great conditions so despite our groups high speculation the trip would be canceled and with an eye on the storm we headed out.
The weather was indeed in our favor and the storm continued inland taking the lightening with it and by the time we arrived at the first dive site conditions looked quite good. Seas were indeed flat, a welcome site for Syd. We did two Nitrox dives on 33% O2 to 55′ for about 40 minutes (well under limits) and had a great time, seeing a wonderful variety of marine life (more on that later). We ended the second dive, had a good trip back in returning to to dock at about 7pm.
The next day we arrived at 7:15am for our next two dives. Due to returning late the night before, we were unable to get Nitrox fills arranged and so would be diving air this day. (Alas, were that not the case, perhaps things may have gone differently – but that is how it went.) The boat left on time and we did two more great drift dives along ledges and once again saw some great marine life. The dive masters from Diving Solutions were fantastic and pointed out all manner of interesting things to see. Both dives went without incident and we were back on the boat after the second dive by about 11am and headed in.
