The new Holy Grail of Diving...TRIOX
TRIOX is another name for hyperoxic Trimix. If you are an advanced diver who has wrecks and reefs you'd like to visit at depths between 120 and 175 feet deep, TRIOX may very well be your Holy Grail. This is not a "Tek" diving nightmare of multiple tanks, gas switches and huge decompression stops. A TRIOX dive runs pretty much like an air dive. The big difference is you get to experience a 170 foot dive with the narcosis level of a 60 foot dive. In other words, you see more, you experience more, you have more fun, you remember more to tell your friends about later, and you are safer with your "IQ intact". You use the same tank as you would for your 60- 80 foot dives on Nitrox. Just a normal scuba tank. You use your normal regulator. There is no nonsense about "Nitrox cleaning", or "TRIOX cleaning", you use the same regulator you would use for air. You can dive special GUE tables ( www.gue.com ), but the reality is, you can dive TRIOX with tables nearly identical to air tables. This means the diver gets to use all the procedures they are already familiar with, and diving stays simple and fun.
Unlike recreational dives to 60 or 80 feet, a TRIOX dive to 170 for 10 minutes means bad gas management could be life threatening. If you go through air like a vacuum cleaner, playing with TRIOX at depth is playing with fire. For this reason, GUE will force most TRIOX students to have completed a Nitrox course with GUE first, so that a GUE instructor has had plenty of time to see the students gas management skills in action. There may be "some" very skilled divers who don't feel Nitrox serves them any purpose for the dives they do, but the clear head for the deeper dives makes the TRIOX course look pretty appealing. For these people, an "Intro to DIR Diving" course can be substituted, assuming they have high skill and experience levels to start with. If you are unfamiliar with DIR Diving, it stands for "Doing it Right" diving, the style created and enforced among its own by the WKPP ( World Record penetration Deep Cave Diving Team with many thousands of tremendously extreme exposure type tek dives in both Ocean and Cave environments, along with about the only "zero death" record in tek diving). It is a method of gear configuration, selection, dive planning, buddy skills, behavior, and a lot more. DIR diving provides the tek or recreational diver alike, more exploration potential, more fun, more efficiency, and more safety. Use of TRIOX is just one of many WKPP's DIR choices about how to handle dives between 100 and 180 feet deep.
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What's a good TRIOX dive in South Florida? One great choice is the HydroAtlantic, pictured in the photo at right, with a maximum depth potential of about 175 feet . As you can see from the growth on this ship, there actually "IS" a lot to see deeper than 60 feet! The link goes to an article written over 5 years ago, one chosen for its "atmosphere". |
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This stairway is one way to descend from the top of the ship to its lower deck. Luckily for the marine life, most people choose to swim rather than walk. |
| You don't need to dive deep for beautiful sites, but don't believe it when people tell you there is nothing worth seeing under 100 feet. |  |
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Another good TRIOX dive site is the "Hole in the Wall", a 140 foot deep dive on a huge Jupiter ledge, with an enormous cave you can find sleeping blacktip, bull, lemon and other "real" sharks in. |
To read about this dive, you can click on a link to a story written many years ago, long before there was a form of diving called technical diving. The old article captures the "spirit" of the exploration, but obviously the IQ levels of the "Guerilla Divers" in the story were badly hampered by narcosis, and their behaviors were without the benefit of the DIR system we use today.