One of the issues I have with social media involving rebreather divers is the dramatic willy waving that goes along with it. Every diver is a bit like this, but CCR divers are an especially terrible version of it - all their units are better and bigger and go deeper than everyone else. This also comes with a certain type of cowboy mentality that bad things won’t happen to them and their mighty unit. Now personally - my unit is long, thick and made of carbon fibre but I quite like not dying when I go diving, so would rather lean on the side of caution when things go wrong.

There is a recent video of a fairly well known (if you are into that sort of thing) British deep CCR wreck diver who outlines that he had a cell (or cells) fail at 90m, guessed which one it was that was wrong, assumed the other two were ok and continued the dive. Without doing a dil flush.

Now personally, if I’d have had a cell fail at that sort of depth my actions would be different. Firstly and most importantly, I wouldn’t care what I’d paid to be there, something would have gone wrong with my life support and I’d be thinking of coming up to review it. I really wouldn’t make any assumption I hadn’t comprehensively tested and proved a couple of times and continued to test all the way up to safety. Making me more exasperated is the cock riding comments on the video about how brave he was and how it was handled. Now I can argue over what exactly would be the correct course of action, but I’m pretty sure most CCR divers would be clear what was the wrong course of action and just riding out a dive on unknown o2 cells at 90m would be pretty high on my list.