What is Tec Diving and Why Should I Care?
by Jerry Otte

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Contents
What technical diving is and is not
Why you should care
Technical Diving Equipment
Being a Smart Diver and a Smart Consumer
Technical Dive Training
PADI/DSAT Technical Diving Course Prerequisites

Honestly, I’m not sure where or when I first heard the term “technical diving” used. Perhaps it was when I took my first nitrox class. At the time, none of the mainstream recreational diving certification agencies were teaching nitrox. I recall taking my class from a cave diving instructor who regaled us with stories of how divers died using nitrox and how we needed to be extremely careful or the same fate awaited us. I came away from the class

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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