I'm certainly not calling for a return to bend and fix ascents and sub-clinical aches and pains on the drive home and day after... but a certain amount of common sense, especially as a backup/bailout is surely in order?
If you need to bailout and have a broken unit on a recreational dive you don't need to creep up doing 10:80 GF ascent over half an hour- just get-off, get up, get out and sort it on the boat.
Sometimes you can be so-far inside the curve it becomes tedious
Thoughts?
I agree. In the 15 years I have been watching trends, I defiantly see more safety being added to more safety added to more..... It keeps growing every year, but why? The real world DCS rate is a tiny tiny fraction, and most of those are caused from conditions of poor planning, preparations or procedures, and not the underlying deco times.
So why does the population want more and more??? One reason is the dive population is getting older, and research tells us that old divers need more deco. But the rest of it seems to be for reasons only that last years extra time, is now today's minimum.
I ended up in the pot after a VPM profile with no safety. A few caveats, it was the original unmodified version of VPM, there had been a lot of pre-dive exertion and I'd had a minor suit flood so was cold.
Still can't face the facts..... Here is
your report on this from 2001 ...
you did NOT go to the pot! Also missed a couple of caveats: it was your own version of VPM code you were testing. You missed stops, you cut the deco short. You wrote
"...I knocked about 5min off my 6m stop because I was cold, bored and worried about my car..."
Is this the annual deepstops / GF thread

Matthieu
Looks like it. Lets fix some of those errors, and address some miss-understandings shown so far in this thread.
Christ I had to go back down and re do some deco running VPMB2 let alone 0???
ATB
Mark
Our online
dive database now has 135,000 dives records from X1's and DR5's. Of those 120,000 are with VPM-B and about 22% are CCR. If we look at the conservatism levels across those, it's like this:
Conservatism level: Zero=8640 One=7428 Two=30741 Three=50263 Four=10810 Five=7985
You can see more people select the fastest, than the slowest speed of deco (though I suspect some of that is modified with add on times).
Mark, there is still an appetite for faster and less conservative deco. Obviously it works well for some, and per Ben's observation above, the majority would seem to be doing "more than enough" deco. I'm in the older group of divers too now (like you), and I realize I need to take it easy, so I'm a +3 now. But sadly, it seems too many of our elderly experienced divers want the entire diving conservatism playing field shifted, just to fit into the aging diver profiles.
Randy had some threads here about DAN bubble testing in the Grand Caymen's (2yrs ago?) which found sporadic high bubble loads at high GF 85 and no incidences of high bubble loads at GF 70. GF low of 30 for both IIRC. That's data which BSAC didn't have when their more aggressive tables were developed decades ago. Ditto the NEDU deep stops study showing that for a given amount of deco time, VPM and other bubble models trying to keep bubbles small by shifting deco time deeper into the profile is counterproductive.
You have made an association in two types of microbubble, that is not correct. Tissue microbubble, and venous microbubble (VGE), are not the same thing. VGE are thought to grow in the venous system from passing dissolved gas. You cannot judge tissue microbubble growth from VGE presence or volume, and its documented in research this way too. Most in the science community recognize that fact, but a couple want to trick you into making a connection between tissue and venous micro-bubbles. Don't get sucked into the junk science fad.
VGE come from supersaturation - which is present in every dive, including simple NDL dives. You can lower the overall supersaturation a little by making the deco longer (the DAN experiment), and spreading the off-gas over more time. That is the basic principle of 'longer is safer', which is part of all deco planning. High VGE are present is fast shallow stop dives too, which Spencer first documented in the early 70's.
My bend in Malta (due to PFO) wasn't reported to BSAC and I never went to a chamber as the symptoms (visual disturbances, nothing else) cleared up within 30mins or so of the onset.
Bend??? Really? Your report above is a typical visual disturbance that occurs in non-divers and the population in general - ask your eye doctor specialist next time your in for an eye exam. It's also a nitrox hi ppO2 warning symptom. Why would you try to imagine this to a diving or DCS cause?
**********
For those who wish to revisit the NEDU study, some diagrams of the discussion are here:
Nedu test diagrams
Also our MultiDeco desktop program has a proper Supersaturation graphing system, where you can see for yourself which profile types are causing the most stress.