Wed Feb 24, 2021 2:46 pm
Nitrox Checkout in Cozumel
Rich (50,001 Questions) and his wife Marie joined Me (SurfLung) and my wife Jill on a wonderful trip to Cozumel last week. We stayed at the fabulous Secrets Aura Cozumel resort all inclusive with airfare, hotel, food, and drink for one bargain price. Rich and I booked three 2-tank boat diving trips and got plenty of experience with my new Nitrox certification. Rich and I spent the mornings diving and the afternoons romancing our wives by the pool.
The diving was run by Dive House and they had several boat/crew options. We told them we wanted small groups and swim throughs. Raul obliged us by putting us on Dive House IV with Captain Rudolpho and Dive Master Victor. Wow did we have fun! Victor kept us no deeper than 80 feet with our Nitrox 32 tanks and led us through lots of Swim Thrus. We saw huge crabs, Angelfish the size of turkey platters, huge nurse sharks, eagle rays, sting rays, skates, HUGE Moray eels, spotted eels, lobsters, I could go on and on if I could remember them all. Visibility was too far to estimate. The water was simply beautiful... And warm. I dove with just a swimsuit, no wetsuit. Now THAT is the way to go once you have your weights figured right. Happily, we figured our salt water weights almost perfectly from having practiced in the freshwater pool here at home.
I dove my Argonaut Kraken double hose regulator with matching Kraken SPG and Safe Second. I used an Oxycheq 18 lb. BCD and the VDH DSV mouthpiece. Everything work just perfectly. Rich dove conventional with his ScubaPro stuff. Victor showed me how to use the oxygen checker and our oxygen percentages varied from 31.5-33.8... We rounded up to 32-34%... Noted it in the log and set the dive computers that way. Otherwise there was nothing different about Nitrox diving except that our bottom times were longer. Us old farts were actually the last to come up as we were so comfortable and effortless we just weren't breathing hard at all.
Nitrox Maximums vs. Minimums: We worked with two different max partial pressures. My SDA certification was for PP of 1.2 and the course gave a max depth of 100 feet on NItrox 32. Rich's PADI course used a PP of 1.4 and max depth of 110 ft with Nitrox 32. THEN, I set my ZOOP for 1.2 and 32% and it gave me a max depth of 87 feet. Then we had the day when our tanks measured 34% O2. The ZOOP set for PP 1.2 calculated the max depth for Nitrox 34 at 80 feet. It is of some concern (which is correct?) when we get different maximums from different sources. But we simply used the shallowest recommended maximum depth as our limit.
I was a long time coming around to the benefits of Nitrox in Scuba diving. But now I see how useful it can be and I think I'll try and incorporate it in more of my local Midwest diving. It might depend on convenience as we don't have a diveshop locally that fills Nitrox. We'll see...
SurfLung
The Freedom and Simplicity of Vintage Equipment and
Vintage Diving Technique are Why I Got Back Into Diving.