France cave diving trip to the Lot

lizardland

Andre has sold the hotel but he still has the diving side. His current e-mail address is:

grimal.andre@tiscali.fr

CDC Lot also arranges for gas deliveries but I'm not sure what they charge.

I've tried to have gas delivered before in the Lot a couple of years ago and it was a major hassle. It was supposed to get there on day 1 of a ten day trip, it arrived on day 7 in the back of a furniture van. The driver unloaded it by chucking the j-bottles straight out the back of the van, about a 1m drop on to concrete which we watched from a safe distance.

We used Gasco in Toulose as they had a UK office which was supposed to have arranged everything. There are AGA and Air Liquide depots in Brive and Figeac but you would need to set up accounts with them in advance. French gases have a different fitting to UK gases and I seem to remember that either the helium or O2 had a male bullnose fitting too.

Cheers,

Stuart

__________________
Can you imagine drifting along in the sea with your mouth open and a load of f***ing plankton going in? You'd like it, would you?

www.westons-cider.co.uk

Azerbaijani Association of Technical Divers Publicity Officer and Goat Wrangler

CaveStainz

Thanks Stuart,

My previous trips to France since 2000 have all been open circuit, so taking my Rebreather out does bring up certain *logistical* problems.. however, i'm probably going to decant straight out of a twin set of oxygen for the first couple of dives using an air diluent but beyond that the trimix fills will be either Andre or CDC.

We made some enquiries on behalf of the other O/C divers and couldn't believe the price, E112 for O2, E198 for He – both 50l @ 200 bar. It seems a lot of cash, and we won't have a booster - so once we've used it we may have to go back to Andre for some more gas.

Any how, it's not fun unless it's expensive right?!

~S

__________________
Steve Walker

EBT

On our last lott trip we took a twinset of dil, a twinset of O2 and our bailout stages. It was MORE than enough to support two ccr divers for an 8 day trip.

If you just want air, you can easily get that filled locally (Andre's or Dave/Lynnes). I guess at a push you could even fill a 12L of donor heliox to decant into your drive tank and air top it in france to make your trimix.

We went with the simple decant option, since we wanted to enjoy the vino in the evening instead of pissing around doing mixing.


/Zak

__________________
Eagles May Soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!

Rebreather World Terms of service
Real diving t-shirts for real divers

lizardland

This spreadsheet might help you calculate your gas requirements for the trip if you are doing top offs from, say, a set of twin 12's.

Supply V = volume of supply bottles
Supply P = fill pressure
Rebreather V = rebreather bottle volume
Used = how much gas you will use (in bar) out of the rebreather bottle before you will fill it, e.g. if you fill the bottle after having used 80 bar out of it then enter '80' NB. This is how much has been used, not the actual pressure reading.
Int Fill = Fill pressure after decanting from low pressure bottle
Final Fill = Fill pressure after decanting from high pressure bottle

It shows how far a 2 bottle cascade will stretch.

NOTE: I haven't checked the maths but it doesn't look too far from what I've had in reality. Remember this is a cascade, not a twinset with an open manifold. Use the 'single' tab if you are decanting from a single bottle.

Cheers,

Stuart

Attached Files

topoff-02.zip (4.9 KB, 26 views)

__________________
Can you imagine drifting along in the sea with your mouth open and a load of f***ing plankton going in? You'd like it, would you?

www.westons-cider.co.uk

Azerbaijani Association of Technical Divers Publicity Officer and Goat Wrangler