Deep Diving, a challenge waiting for you!

11 Aug 2021No Comments

If you’ve already done your good share of diving, you probably feel like you’re ready for new adventures that involve greater depth. We know that the deeper you dive in, the greater the chances of seeing other types of marine life, walls, or sunken ships. Maybe you’re wondering if you are ready for such an experience.

In this chapter we will talk about the aspects of deep diving so that we can analyze the possibility of knowing this new experience.

A deep dive is defined as a dive that is greater than 18 meters and does not exceed 40 meters deep.

There are several important factors to consider before doing a deep dive.

• Diving time:

Due to the increase in dive depth, the air consumption is higher, so the diving time will decrease. We should constantly check both the amount of air in our tank and the depth at which we are.

• Nitrogenic narcosis:

The narcotic threshold is considered to be at 30 – 40 meters deep.

Despite being an inert gas, nitrogen is anesthetic when breathed under pressure, that is, while diving at strong depths.  Signs and symptoms vary from individual to individual and include joviality and quackery, euphoria, dizziness, vertigo, disorientation, irrational behavior, or inability to perform simple tasks, among others. Because the diver might have some of these alterations, he might have a hard time remembering how to emerge by himself and would require help. Here we can see the importance of the peer system, although it should be considered that the partner also runs the risk of suffering a narcosis, for being under similar pressure.

All symptoms disappear when the pressure decreases, that is, when ascending to a shallower diving depth. It is important to approach the diver and ascend him slowly. This diver could have an amnesia that prevents him from remembering exactly what happened, because of narcosis.

Narcosis is a physical, non-chemical effect of the inert gas in our nervous system and its prevention is very simple: do not breathe air more than 40 meters deep, or even in a lesser depth, without being previously qualified and certified, because it is necessary to know well the possible risks of this condition.

• Nitrogen absorption:

From the initial descent and throughout the immersion, our tissues absorb this gas. Of course, the absorption will depend on the dive depth and background time. In deep diving the absorption will always be greater. When the ascent starts, we eliminate the gas; at this stage it is important not to skip decompression stops. In addition, we must monitor our ascent speed which should be no greater than 60 feet per minute, although to increase our security the DAN (Divers Alert Network) recommends that we perform it at 30 feet per minute.

We do this to minimize the possibility of a decompression disease.

• Diving with Nitrox:

This gas mixture in nitrox is the same as the air we breathe on the surface and while diving, but has different percentages. By containing a higher percentage of O2 there is not as much nitrogen saturation. This allows us more diving time but increases the possibility of hyperoxia. Therefore nitrox is not recommended in deep dives.

• Technical Diving:

There is another type of diving that is done at a greater depth, and it is called technical diving.  It involves more advanced knowledge, additional equipment, and other mixtures such as Heliox, where a gas that has no narcotic effects and that is biologically inert as it is helium is added to the mixture.

The consideration with this gas is that, having a thermal conductivity 6 times greater than nitrogen, causes drastic hypothermia.

Hydrox (hydrogen and oxygen) is also used, but not as widely, as hydrogen has a high inflammatory potential.

In technical diving, more decompression stops are made.  Even in extreme depth dives the ascent can be up to twice as long as diving and decompression stops can last up to an hour.

The deepest diving record so far!

The record for the deepest diving is set by Egypt’s Ahmed Gamal. In 2014 he managed to descend to 332 meters. He only spent 12 minutes diving but lasted 15 hours ascending due to the different decompression stops he needed to make. It took more than 60 tanks of different mixtures of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and helium to achieve this feat.

For now, we do not want you to try something so hard, but if you want to dive to a greater depth than you normally do, the answer is very simple:

Take the advanced course or the specialty of Deep Diver!