Scuba diving, with all the obvious enjoyment and excitement that divers can experience, is never without a problem. One of the many concerns that continue to challenge many scuba divers is the decompression sickness. This one actually occurs when a diver reaches beyond the maximum limit that his or her body can take up air. Because of the need to address this problem, scuba divers have found a better way to prevent this decompression sickness from happening. This they do with the help of dive tables.

Who would have ever thought that these printed cards of dive tables would be the ultimate key in making it possible to address decompression sickness? These cards provide approximation on when and where to exactly stop in a diver’s descent. This is to make sure that decompression sickness is avoided.

Generally scuba divers, with the use of dive tables, are taught to assume that square dive represents a dive profile. This means that the scuba diver can only stay at an approximated depth for a certain time period with reference to the time when the diver descended to a desired depth until the time the diver resurface. For every depth there is a required amount of time to stay under the same depth at a given time. Failure to follow the recommended dive profile found from dive tables will increase the possibility of the occurrence of decompression sickness, which could be hazardous to the scuba divers.

Dive tables, which are also known as decompression tables, come in different forms depending on the organizations that use them and the varieties of needs that they are used for. Different diving associations like the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) and National Association of Underwater Instructors have made their own dive tables that are prescribed to their members to use. Each dive table is totally different from the rest which a PADI diver should not use the one from NAUI not because of competition but because of the difference in the presentation of the table, otherwise if a diver is well versed with any of the two then there should be no problem in using which dive table.

The NAUI dive table for instance, had made use of letter group symbols in expressing the something. For example to illustrate the remaining oxygen in the body, letters had been used to signify it. These letters range from A-L in sequentially. So, the letter A will represent the initial amount of nitrogen in the body. When the table shows a movement towards the letter L this only means that the nitrogen has increased.

The make-up of the NAUI dive tables has taken its inspiration from the dive tables or decompression tables that the US Navy is using. Interestingly it was the US Navy that first exploited the advantages of scuba that Dr. Christian Lambertsen invented as an underwater warfare. Emile Gagnan in collaboration with Jacques-Yves Costeau further developed what Lambertsen had started, which is today’s famous scuba. For this reason it is only understandable if the US Navy were able to come up with their dive tables. True enough; the US Navy dive tables have somehow become a standard and single most important tool in preventing underwater decompression sickness that the NAUI had more or less copied.

With the emergence of modern technology, these dive tables may yet to become obsolete as state-of-the-art gadgets and gizmos are now made available of the scuba divers’ convenience. One of these high-tech tools is the dive computer. This gadget can practically monitor the scuba divers’ actual dive vis-à-vis the actual planned dive. Unlike the usual dive tables the dive computer is not working based on the conventional square profile. It can also practically estimate the actual depth profile at a given time.

Though the dive tables may have soon to become outmoded, nevertheless they have really made a great impact in scuba diving. With that decompression sickness might just well a thing in the past.