Found a stat about dive computer failures that caught me off guard

I was reading through some DAN accident reports last night and saw that over 60% of decompression sickness cases involved a diver who either ignored or misread their dive computer. That number seems way too high for a piece of gear we all trust our lives to. Makes me wonder if we rely too much on the screen and not enough on our own tables and gas planning. Has anyone else here gone back to using a backup analog depth gauge and timer?

2 comments

2 Comments

finley93914d ago

Bull. Those numbers are misleading because they lump together people who flat out ignored their computer with people who made a minor miscalculation. If someone's dumb enough to override a mandatory deco stop, that's not a computer failure, that's a user failure. I still run a backup timer and depth gauge but mostly because batteries die, not because I'm trying to outsmart the algorithm. The computer is way more reliable than my ability to do mental math on a narc'd brain at 100 feet.

tessa_roberts114d ago

And honestly, with narcosis hitting differently each dive depending on how cold or hard you're working, trusting your computer's backup gas integration is way smarter than trying to do the math yourself. Like, I've watched guys fumble with their slates at 120 feet and it's just scary knowing they think they can outcalculate an algorithm that's been tested on thousands of dives.