My decompression stops were off for 4 years and a dive in Santa Barbara caught it

I always ran my stops on the surface interval clock from my watch, not the dive computer's tissue loading readout. Last month on a 90 foot wreck dive near Santa Barbara, my buddy asked why I was hanging at 15 feet for 8 minutes when the computer said 5. Turns out the watch was 2 minutes fast and I had been shorting my shallow stops on every bounce dive, probably did that on 60 plus dives. Has anyone else found their timing method was flawed and switched entirely to the console readout?

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miles58129d ago

Isn't it funny how we trust our little habits more than the actual tools we bought to keep us safe? I mean, we'll set a timer on our phone for the oven but then insist on eyeballing the bread color instead. Same thing here, you built a whole system around that watch and it felt right because it was yours. The real kicker is that it probably worked just fine for years until the drift got bad enough to matter. Glad you caught it before something worse happened, because 15 feet vs 5 feet is a big difference when your body is already loaded up.