On Wednesday, July 12, 2000 6:00 PM, Michael Doelle wrote:

>Strike wrote,

>>Chris Parrett, CEO of Abysmal Diving Inc. gave a presentation on
Developments in Decompression Theory. <

>"President and CEO". As with all of  these  one-man/woman-companies. And he
does not do any research in deco theory himself, of course.  So what was so
interesting  about his talk?

I haven't transcribed any of my tapes yet, but essentially he presented the
theories of
Dr. Bruce Wienke, Director of the Computation Testbed for Industry, Advanced
Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the creator of
the RGBM (Reduced Gradient Bubble Model) that will be incorporated into the
new Abyss.

If you've got the time and the interest you can read some of this at:

http://www.abysmal.com/pages/articles.html

>>Viv!  I'll tell you about Neil's presentation - and Olivier Isler's -
later.<

>Olivier's presentation was certainly worth the ticket price.

He's a fascinating guy who's successfully performed some notable deep solo
underwater cave penetrations in France using rebreathers.  He's built his
own (R.I. 2000) prototype featuring Closed Circuit redundancy.  He gave me a
copy of some of his thoughts on rebreathers that - when I get a few
moments - I'll type up and post.

One paragraph reads:  "As for cave dives, my experience has convinced me
that three independent circuits are an absolute minimum to undertake such
dives with a minimum of serenity."

I like that word "serenity".  In fact, it's a word that matches the man's
demeanour. :-)

Strike