divEr 24
divers violating nitrox depth limits and
also didn’t want tourist divers extending
their bottom times, thank you very much.
It also had the support of Skin Diver
magazine – Cayman Water Sports was
SDM’s largest advertiser at the time.
Many heated phone calls and faxes
were exchanged. Tom Mount, who had
become president of IAND and changed
the name to the International Association
of Nitrox & Technical Divers (IANTD),
and Ed Betts, president and co-founder of
ANDI, flew out to meet Gray.
While these talks were going on,
I enlisted the help of Dr Bill and, along
with Diving Unlimited Inc founder and
CEO Dick Long with his Scuba Diving
Resources Group and Richard
Nordstrom, then CEO of Stone’s
company Cis-Lunar Development Labs,organised the Enriched Air Nitrox
(EAN) Workshop in January 1992 in
Houston, Texas.
The workshop took place days before
the DEMA show was to be held there.
Our goal was to bring all the stakeholders
together to discuss nitrox and its uses. In
light of the workshop, Gray agreed to
rescind the ban on nitrox vendors
attending DEMA.
As a result of the workshop, too, the
sport-diving community established the
first set of policies addressing the use of
nitrox, as well as establishing that nitrox
was not limited to technical diving but
could be used by all sport divers.
We issued the findings from the
workshop written by Dr Bill in
technicalDiverVol. 3.1 that July.
That year, the first page of the DEMA
exhibitor’s guide offered a warning about
using nitrox with scuba equipment.
Ironically, it generated an enormous buzz
at the show, causing attendees to ask:
“What is nitrox?” This proved to be great
advertising for mixed-gas technology and
the training agencies.T
HE SUMMER OF 1992was a tragic
one for the fledging tech-diving
community. There were eight high-profile
diving fatalities, including two on the
Andrea Doriawreck and one at the
Ginnie Springs cave system in Florida,
along with a number of close calls that
resulted in injury.
Then that autumn there was a double
fatality involving a father-and-son team
on the unidentified German submarine,
referred to as the U-Who(later identified
as U869by John Chatterton and Richie
Kohler).
Many feared that these deaths would
bring on government regulation and
effectively shut down technical diving.
With a rising number of fatalities,
Skin Divermagazine went on a crusade
with a three-part editorial series in the
last three months of 1992, calling for an
end to deep diving and nitrox use, or at
least a return to the closet.
Editor Bill Gleason in his October 1992
editorial Deep Diving / Nitrox Perspective,
wrote: “Get back in the closet and give
responsible divers the opportunity to
close and lock the door on deep diving.”
The fact that some of these editorials
confused the use of nitrox with deep
diving shows the lack of information and
understanding at the time regarding the
technology. Nitrox is typically used as a
bottom gas on relatively shallow dives
(less than 40m), and by technical divers as
a decompression gas following deep
helium dives.
Meanwhile, the Cayman Water Sports
Association issued a warning that the
local chambers would not treat diversrepresented a powerful paradigm shift for
the sport-diving community. As author
Neil Postman wrote in his book
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to
Technology: “New technologies compete
with old ones – for time, for attention, for
money, for prestige, but mostly for
dominance of their world view.”
Overnight the emergence of technical
diving, made possible by the use of
mixed-gas technology, turned the
recreational diving world on its head.
While PADI “deep divers” were
cautiously edging their way down to their
40m depth limit, many tech divers were
ascending to that depth to pull their first
decompression stop.
Needless to say, recreational diving
instructors no longer represented the
apex of the sport-diving foodchain.
In addition, while once considered the
mark of the elite, diving beyond 67m on
air was considered increasingly foolish.
As Woodville Karst Plain Project
(WKPP) co-founder Bill Gavin said of
deep-air record diving: “It’s like setting
the Bonneville Flats
speed record while
drunk. What’s the point?”
Of course, mix
technology was not being
promoted only for
technical divers. In
addition to use by the
emerging tech
community, Dick
Rutkowsky, a former
aquanaut, deputy diving
director for the National
Oceanic & Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA),
founder of the International Association
of Nitrox Divers (IAND) and co-founder
of American Nitrox Divers Inc (ANDI),
began promoting the use of nitrox for
recreational diving.
And he was colourfully recalcitrant in
his advocacy. “Diving on air is like having
sex without a condom. The technology is
there. It’s stupid not to use it,” Rutkowsky
offered at the time.
Not surprisingly, there was dramatic
pushback from the existing recreational-
diving industry establishment, which had
at the time little or no knowledge-base of
nitrox or mixed-gas technology and was
concerned about safety, blending
methods and the potential for oxygen
fires.
In the autumn of 1991, Bob Gray,
DEMA founder and executive director,
decided to ban nitrox vendors and
training agencies such as IAND and
ANDI from attending the annual
international trade show.
I later learned that the move was
instigated by the Cayman Water Sports
Association, which was concerned aboutClockwise from top:
Turning on the nitrox tap
was controversial to say
the least; deep-diving
controversy in Skin Diver; the
magazine’s Just Say No to
Nitrox?editorial by Bill
Gleason; Dick Rutkowsky:
‘The technology is there. It’s
stupid not to use it’; nitrox
warning on the first page of
the 1992 DEMA
show guide.BRET GILLIAMdivErNEt.com