Ever heard of diving on Nitrox? Strange sounding name for a pretty simple product. When you go recreational diving, the cylinder you take with you contains the same air that you breathe on the surface; comprised of 21% oxygen and 79% nitrogen, well, if you’re a geek you’ll know it’s actually 78.08% nitrogen, 0.93% argon, 0.03% carbon dioxide, 0.0018% neon, 0.0005% helium, 0.0001% krypton 0.00005% hydrogen and 8.7 x 10-6 xenon, but in such low proportions they are considered inert, and bunched together with nitrogen.
Diving on Nitrox
Nitrox is a gas that you can dive on that contains a higher percentage of oxygen- up to 40%. Why bother? Well, I’m glad you asked. Nitrox can have a number of benefits compared with using old fashioned air. It has the potential to provide longer no-decompression limits, shorter surface intervals, and enable longer repetitive dives. We can only dive for a certain amount of time at a given depth due to the nitrogen we are breathing under pressure. By increasing the oxygen content and reducing the amount of nitrogen we breathe, it allows us to stay longer at that depth. The fact that we will have breathed less nitrogen on our dive also means that there is less to come out of our system, hence the shorter surface interval- that’s the time you have to spend on the boat between dives twiddling your thumbs and sunning yourself. The more diving we do, the more nitrogen we absorb cumulatively, so if you’re diving more than one dive a day for a number of days, it will give you longer at depth than if you were doing the same dives on standard air- good if you’re going on a Big Blue liveaboard trip on the West coast of Thailand. Some people also say that they feel less tired after diving on nitrox. There’s no evidence to prove that, but hey, if it feels good, why not!
SSI Nitrox Specialty Course
In order to be able to dive using Nitrox, you will have to do a specialty course and guess what, we can teach you! For the SSI nitrox speciality, we can teach you in half a day, and you will have the option of just doing the course without going on any dives on it. As long as you understand the requirements for diving on it, you can use it on your dives to your heart’s content. But you can also do the classroom session and then go for two dives with your instructor if you’d rather. Then you’ll be a qualified nitrox diver for the rest of your life- another string to your diving bow. If you’re interested in expanding your diving skills and are really switched on, you can combine the nitrox course with the deep and wreck specialities, which also works out much cheaper than doing each speciality on its own. We can also teach the nitrox course through PADI, TDI and SDI.
If you’re already a qualified diver you will hopefully have understood at least half of all this! If you’re coming to Big Blue to do your open water course, don’t worry, by the end of it you’ll have a much better idea about why all the guys at Big Blue Tech are all diving on Nitrox.
