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thinking “these people are crazy” and didn’t
dive nitrox again for two years. Since then, things have changed.
Virtually all of the recreational training agencies now teach basic
nitrox. The PADI Enriched Air course actually even includes an entire
section on technical diving. In addition, best selling books like The
Last Dive and Shadow Divers have popularized technical diving in the
form of cave diving and deep wreck diving with their tales of danger and
bravery. So unless you have just started diving or have been living under a rock, you probably have heard the
term “technical diving” bandied about somewhere. But what is technical
diving and why should you care?
What
technical diving is and is not
Let’s start with what technical diving is
not. Technical diving is not military diving or commercial diving. It is
also not scientific diving or public safety diving. Like recreational
diving, technical diving is “sport” diving; it is diving done for fun.
But technical diving involves going beyond
the limits established for recreational scuba diving. Generally speaking a
technical dive would involve one or more of the following:
- Diving below 130 feet
- Staying at any depth beyond the no
decompression limit
- Penetrating a cave or wreck beyond the
light zone
- Switching gases at depth
- Using oxygen, enriched air blends above
40 percent, trimix, or other special gases
But simply going beyond recreational limits
is not technical diving. Any recreational diver can descend beyond 130 feet
or
stay down long enough to exceed a decompression limit. Recreational divers
either inadvertently or intentionally do this all
of the time, but we don’t call them technical divers. We call them “stupid”
or “careless.”
So how is technical diving different? Technical diving involves planned
dives that exceed recreational limits. Technical
dives are also done with large amounts of special equipment that mitigates
some of the risk involved in exceeding the limits
of recreational dives.
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