A California dive company has release a new product that they claim will help reduce Decompress Illness. Called Safe-d-stop, it consists of 4 main components: 100% O2 cylinder with 20-foot regulator-whips, a trapeze bar that extends 15 feet, and a surface-floating bag with attached dive flag. The bag is also the carrying/storage case.

So you float this thing out, deploy it, then do your dive, come back, do 5 mins decompression or safety stop, on 100% O2 , surface, put this thing away and drag it back to shore.

The thought is that the O2-stop is a better decompression stop, as you aren’t absorbing any nitrogen (N2), because your Oxygen-window open and are now off-gassing more N2 than simply on air alone, which is only 21% O2. This is also what is done on a technical dive, it allows for a faster decompression and gets you out of the water faster.

However, you have to watch it. Your body can only take so much O2 at a time and too much oxygen can result in oxygen toxicity or ox-tox. Ox-toxing underwater can be a little troublesome, since it’s comparable to a grand mal seizure where people typically spit the regs out of their mouth and drown.

So I’m not sure this is worth that potential hassle or the $1200 expensive. However, they have made a clean, compact, system that would be great for remote locations

So, if I were an instructor, I might consider buying one of these things and using it for classes. Check out this video, they made it look really easy to deploy, but I can’t imagine trying to drag this thing out into the surf on beach dive unless you had a bunch of people helping you keep track of it when a wave hit you.

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