Nitrox workshop dings - Divers Alert Network

Rubicon Foundation Archive (http://rubicon-foundation.org)Lang (ed.): DAN Nitrox Workshop, Divers Alert Network, November 2000ranged from threats of lawsuit on restraint of trade issues to simple faxes to the DEM A Board ofDirectors saying, in effect, get educated and stop making fools of yourselves. After a fewmeetings of nitrox community leaders and the DEMA brain trust, the hatchet was buried andbusiness went on as usual.Later the same year, Skin Diver magazine decided to make nitrox its soapbox sermon of theyear. It blamed the gas and those who promoted it with about every thing imaginable, stoppingjust short of linking the whole lot to global warming, the introduction of rap music, and NewCoke. After a passionate gnashing of teeth and damning editorials resulting in much heat butprecious little light shed on a relatively benign technology, the diving consumer public elected tomake up its own collective mind and nitrox popularity soared. There must be something abouttrying to remove the public's choice and censorship that stirs interest in everything from bannedbooks to tanks with green and yellow bands.When PADI announced that it would introduce its own nitrox training program in January1996, the last bastion of resistance effectively fell. Now even the most strident opponents haveeaten proverbial crow.How could such a hot button item go from raging controversy to nearly universal acceptancein such a short time? It was probably due to a combination of circumstances. I always believedthat the diving consumer was smarter than most give him credit for. Those divers whoexperimented with nitrox found out quickly that they didn't spontaneously combust frombreathing a higher oxygen content, neither did they find themselves doing a convulsive tap dancewith the grim reaper if they used the gas within the widely accepted depth and time limits. Thehysterical scare tactics of a few partisans with a thinly veiled agenda simply didn't wash with thediving public capable of making their own intelligent decisions.Nitrox Dive ComputersAnother factor in the burgeoning business of nitrox has been the proliferation of supportequipment by mainstream manufacturers. Perhaps the biggest breakthrough came with theintroduction of programmable nitrox dive computers allowing divers to maximize the benefits ofenriched air by incorporating all the elements of multilevel profiling. It was precisely thosefeatures that convinced so many divers to embrace computers in the first place. Those diverswere an exact demographic fit for nitrox use. They wanted to increase their bottom time and adda safety margin over the tables. Nitrox offers many of the same advantages but divers were loathto return to tables for dive planning. With the advent of affordable nitrox computers, nitroxreceived a boost that pushed its popularity over the top. No longer confined to wrestling withtables, keeping convoluted records of bottom times, surface intervals and varying mixtures,today's modern nitrox diver can turn the process over to his micro-chip buddy and even programdifferent mixes for each dive. Bingo, diving just got fun again.Initially, these computers tended to be on the pricey side but market competitive influenceshave now brought nitrox computers down as low as $300 while offering more bells and whistlesthan ever before. Currently there are several dozen models offered in North America. Most34