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 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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