I spent a loooong ”off work” stint in 2016 and had the time to do a lot of reading. Off course, being an avid diver, I read some diving literature as well and one of them was ”Deco for divers”, considered a must-read.
I can highly recommend the book if you’re interested in the subject of technical diving or if you’re and open water diver and just want to no more on decompression theory.
One of the subjects that gave me a ”wow” moment was the importance of safety stops and also the appropriate ascent rate. As the book correctly points out, there is no such thing as a ”no decompression dive” but rather when diving within the open water rules of PADI, the ascent rate keeps you within the decompression ”zone”, meaning that the right ascent rate makes for that you decompress as you ascend.
Ascending too quickly will lead to extensive and/or dangerous bubble formation.
When you attend the PADI open water and AOW training, you are taught that you should ascend 18m/min and that you should do a safety stop of 3 min between 3-6 meters. The following graph shows you how much bubbles can be found in your body when doing no safety stop, after a 2 minute safety stop at 3m and finally after doing 1 min at 6 meters and 4 minutes at 3 meters. As you can see, the difference is quite dramatic in terms of bubble formation and, at least for me when doing many dives several days in a row, I will adopt to other strategy for the safety stops.
