Nailer99 wrote:My friends and I dive mixed teams of OC and CCR all the time. Two good buddies we dive with have been doing deep tech dives w/ CCR and OC together for years- they're hitting the Admiral Sampson, in 310 fsw, this weekend, as a matter of fact. (Not their first time there, either.)
I know the DIR line on CCRs, and that's cool. But you should know that there are people out there bagging big dives as mixed OC/CCR teams. Strangely, they don't seem to have much of a problem with this. Just like Howard and Ken seem to have no problem diving with us- they understand how to get emergency gas from a stage bottle, which isn't terribly hard to do. We know that our limiting factor is their gas and deco obligation, so we dive OC profiles with them. It's not rocket surgery. If you're looking at team resourses, each CCR diver basically has enough OC gas to get an entire diver back to the surface without getting bent, from max depth/ deco obligation. They will probably not need it- which means that every CCR diver is carrying a whole entire rescue package, for whoever might need it, on them. THAT'S a helluva "team resource."
Yeah, but people solo dive all the time. Not my cup of tea. Just because people are doing it doesn't mean it is right for everyone, or for me.
I, quite frankly, have probably less of a risk tolerance than those diving mixed teams, or doing 310 fsw dives. Remember, we started diving at remarkably similar times, you've progressed much faster and to much deeper depths than I have in the same time period. Is it skill? Probably not, the difference between us is probably a thirst for depth/wrecks that meant you were more willing to move quickly through education to get there. Me on the other hand? I take baby steps and do things like limit myself to one deco bottle after finishing my tech training.
CCR divers always point to their bailout gas as the ultimate team resource.
It isn't.
Lurking in the background as a CCR diver is the very real possibility of hypoxia and CO2, two things that, if they effect one diver, they'd effect the whole team the way I dive. What is always missing in these discussions is not what you can provide the team, but what happens if something goes wrong to the RB diver, not the OC diver. It is worth noting that based on complexity of systems alone, the RB diver is more likely to experience a failure.
Let's set up a couple scenarios. If I'm at 150 feet and my buddy has a gear problem (say, a valve failure) we know how to handle it because we dive the same rigs. If you have as similar failure with a mixed team, the OC person is going to have much less of a familiarity of your rig than you do. Where do they turn off the bottle if something happens? What are the consequences of that action? If they did have similar familiarity, they would probably not be diving OC. Rebreathers still have a much higher fatality rate than OC, and the failures that are possible are much more lethal. For me to accept that as part of the team for big dives, I'd have to have a damn good reason (like all of us needing them for the depths we were at).
I do find it interesting that the CCR types push mixed teams just as hard as some DIR types push a backplate or a fundies class.
600 miles, 36 hours, 5 dives. Rock & Roll.