Day 4: First dive on helium

Location: Mexico

Date: October 9th, 2012

Whoop, Whoop. Today is going to be my first dive on Helium! oh yeah. so questions is do you think my voice will go squeaky? I'll give you the answer later.

So first Theory. Today it is all about OXYGEN! The toxicity of it, the narcosis effect it has and how dangerous it can be. But also what good it can do. Medical background people that read this will understand vaso-dilation and vaso-construction. Which in short basically means the closing and opening of cells. Like your lungs. With breathing oxygen the little "trees" that grow on you lungs increase. water fills the sides of your lungs making them smaller. So the longer you are on oxygen the smaller they get. So smaller lungs means bad off gassing ( the whole purpose of decompression). So we have oxygen gaps in our decompression dives to open up the lungs again for a optimum off gassing situation. Still following? Well i barely was!!!!! hahaha however it all clicked today and that was a wicked feeling. I actually get it! I get the science behind it and I understand why we are doing all of this!!! YEY.

We also talked about emergency procedures like what happens if someone drops a deco tank ( besides the fact you think your buddy is stupid you do kinda want to help him). Well you have to start sharing gasses etc etc. 

In the afternoon I did my first proper deco dive on Helium. Max depth was 40m today and i did some line laying at 40m just to see how my narcotic level was. Awesome i did not act too stupid so all good. Today my buddy was Kelvin as Frank did not join the dive. So after fooling around for 20m at 40mtr we did a little no vis exit exercise and reeled in the reel and started ascending. Once we were at 21mtr we switched gases and this time i actually remembered to send up the sausage.  Once we started ascending to the next level, surprise surprise, Kelvin ran out of deco gas. So i had to give him mine and now we were sharing my tank and i had to divert to our back up deco plan. Ok peeps just to let you know. All these plans are in my had I have no slates or anything like that to help me remember it. So plans, times, what exercises we do etc etc. So give me a break for forgetting the sausage hahah

 Tomorrow is the setup dive for the big big dive the day after. SO EXCITING! Sorry mom I know you hate it! don't look down tomorrow or  the day after.... you won't like what you see hahaha

AYO, XOXO