Dive specialty of the month: Enriched Air Diver

10 Jul Dive specialty of the month: Enriched Air Diver

One of the most popular PADI Specialties is the PADI Enriched Air Diver course, and with good reason. Take the PADI Specialty this July at Joe’s Gone Diving and pay just IDR2,000,000.

Most people know diving with enriched air, also more commonly known as the nitrox course, will allow you to dive longer. Being able to dive on nitrox is especially useful if you are planning to go on a dive holiday and do multiple days of diving.

So how does that work? As you might recall from your open water course, the amount of nitrogen you absorb limits your dive. Normal air consists of about 21% oxygen and about 79% nitrogen, by increasing the oxygen and decreasing the nitrogen in your tank mixture you don’t reach your decompression limit so quickly which means longer dives!

A common misconception is that diving with nitrox also allows you to go deeper, that is incorrect. In fact oxygen can become toxic at a certain depth so you have to make sure you stay within the appropriate depth limits. How deep you can dive, will depend on the percentage of oxygen. During your enriched air diver course on Bali you will learn what depths are safe and how to set your dive computer to the right oxygen percentage to make sure you dive safely.

Here at Joe’s Gone Diving, we normally dive on 32% oxygen as it will safely allow you to dive to at least 30 metres. You might notice when you are diving with us that all our dive staff dives on nitrox wherever possible just so they don’t build up so much nitrogen.

The PADI Enriched Air Diver course takes 1/2 day and is just a theoretical course, so you can take it on a non-diving day or in the afternoon after your dives.