Blue Season Bali Newsletter 2010
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Tips from the Experts - Enriched Air Diving
This month’s edition of the tip from the expert is dealing with the magic word ‘Nitrox’.
Many things are said about Nitrox but not all are true. Let’s just kick off by eliminating one of the most common misconceptions regarding Nitrox. Amongst some divers the story goes that nitrox will help you to dive longer. This is true somehow as it will allow you to dive longer at certain depths, but more about that in a minute. What we really need to understand is that when your dive cylinder with a 10L volume is filled with 200bar of air or 200bar of nitrox, you will when doing two identical dives, use up your gas supply equally fast.
So you might ask yourself why then would I use nitrox when diving. Nitrox does have it advantages over normal air. Due to the increased percentage of oxygen and thus the decreased percentage of nitrogen, you will be able to spend more time at certain depths. If we would simply have a look at the air dive table and check the no decompression limit for 30m, then we would see that we cannot spend more than 20 minutes underwater; if we have a look at the no decompression limit for 30 meter on the EANx 32 dive table, we can see that our no decompression has gone up to 29 minutes. This is a significant difference.
Diving with nitrox can also give you a safety advantage if you stick to the air dive table whilst using a nitrox blend. You will in this case not benefit from the extended no decompression time, but will enjoy an added safety margin. Another benefit would be the partial elimination of nitrogen narcosis. Nitrogen narcosis is linked to the percentage of nitrogen in our dive cylinder when we are at a certain depth, when we of course have a lesser percentage of nitrogen in our dive cylinder then we will be staying further away from a nitrogen narcosis occurrence.
We should however not forget that adding oxygen to our breathing gas also brings some new limitations in the form of oxygen toxicity. These advantages and limitations are what the PADI Nitrox Specialty course deals with.
Please contact us for more information regarding this and many other PADI Specialties taught by Blue Season Bali’s Instructor team.
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