Cozumel Trip and What I Learned on My Vacation

[javelindan]

Sounds like a great dive trip, DanL! Additionally, and perhaps most significantly, a highly educational trip. It seems you can never know too much about diving and one should never overestimate one's abilities, huh? Aqua Safari sounds like a great outfit and I look forward to the opportunity to dive with them some day.

Regarding dive planning, I've used the PADI Wheel for years and only recently bought a dive computer (Suunto Mosquito). Interestingly, when I started comparing no-decompression limits, etc. between tables (Navy and PADI), the Wheel, and my dive computer, they were all very different. This makes sense if you're always calculating your bottom time using the deepest part of your dive for the tables, the wheel being more accurate and able to handle multiple levels, and dive computers able to calculate based on actual depths visited. When asking a couple of tech divers about this, they said never to mix planning/diving approaches (i.e. tables/wheel/dive computers). I figured I could do some dive planning with my wheel and then track my dives using my computer but they said not to. They said if you're going to use the dive computer, then to do planning using software associated with the specific computer... anyway, I want to do some more homework on this. The two tech divers were in a dive shop so perhaps they were simply trying to sell me software?