Nitrox Course

This program generally takes just a few hours. There are no required dives. With sufficient notice, we can usually offer this course when it’s most convenient for you.

This course is $159 per student. This includes:

• All instruction
• Online coursework with a digital certification card

• Be at least 18 years old.

• Be certified to the Open Water level or be enrolled in the Open Water course.

Longer bottom times. Shorter surface intervals. Potentially greater safety margins. It’s no wonder Nitrox is the single most popular Specialty Diver course.

Nitrox is nothing more than the air you are breathing right now with additional oxygen added. The extra oxygen doesn’t do anything for you but, in sufficient concentrations, can actually be dangerous. The benefit of adding oxygen to air is that it dilutes the concentration of nitrogen. For example:

• The most popular Nitrox mixture contains 32 percent oxygen (EAN32) as opposed to the 21 percent found in atmospheric air. This makes the nitrogen concentration 68 percent as opposed to the normal 79 percent.

• At a depth of 98 feet, the intensity of your exposure to nitrogen on EAN32 is the same as it would be at 80 feet if diving air.

• This means that at 98 feet on EAN32, your dive computer will use the same no-decompression limits as it would at 80 feet on air. This nearly doubles your bottom time.

Diving Nitrox involves no special underwater skills. The skills you must master to become a Nitrox diver are:

• Analyzing the gas in your cylinders for its oxygen content.

• Setting your dive computer to match the oxygen content of the gas you are breathing.

These are the skills you will practice with your instructor during the course — after you complete the Certification processing when earned portion. There are no required dives, although many students take the Nitrox Diver course in conjunction with other courses. You can even do it concurrently with your Open Water Diver class.

In this course, the skills we cover include:

• Correctly read and mark Nitrox cylinder
• Correctly program a Nitrox computer
• Determine Adjusted NDLs using a Nitrox computer

Most importantly, we don’t practice these skills until you finally get them right. We have you repeat them until you can’t do them wrong.