When we talk about recreational diving, we are often referring to single tank scuba diving in warm water, tropical locations. Just search scuba diving in the search engine of your choice, click on images, and see what comes up!
All of my current teaching is for recreational scuba diving. Being more exact, we are referring to non-decompression dives* to a depth no greater than 40m. There are so many things to do and see that fall within the boundaries of recreational diving, what else is there to consider? Well, if you want to go deeper and dive for longer, you soon start to encounter the world of technical diving. Technical diving covers nearly everything outside of recreational diving.
So why this long-winded introduction? Well, I’ve made the first steps into the technical diving arena, and thought you might like to understand why and what I’m learning about. I should say from the outset, I have no real desire to dive to 80m for the sake of it, to dive with twins and four stage tanks, or to explore caves. I would, however, like to understand more about different equipment configurations, perhaps dive a little deeper and longer than would be available under the recreational banner, and generally become a better diver. All of these things can be achieved by starting to learn about technical diving, yet do not demand that do any of the things I laid out above, that I have no desire to do.
I’m very much at the beginning of this journey and am starting off learning about twins. Twins means two cylinders on your back, instead of the standard one. This immediately doubles the normal gas supply, therefore achieving the aim of diving for longer. This is particularly the case here in Hong Kong, where dives are nearly always curtailed by lack of gas versus lack of NDL (no decompression limit) time. Diving twins starts to add more complexity to your equipment set up, but also more redundancy. Learning about manifolds and valve shutdowns and long hose configuration is all rather exciting, and is really helping me to understand more about diving in general. Added to this is that the skills demanded of a technical diver are greater than those of a recreational diver, therefore there are more things to learn, and more techniques to try to master. Suffice to say, I am nowhere near where I need to be yet, but practicing and making progress is very rewarding.
The next step will be to learn about sidemount, adding another configuration that is available, should the dive objective require it.
So whilst I will learn about and be certified in the basic elements of technical diving, I believe the most important thing I will get from this new adventure will be to become a much better recreational diver, and possibly use technical elements to extend my enjoyment of recreational diving. I will certainly keep you posted on my progress!
*Technically, every dive is a decompression dive, however we often refer to dives that do not require specific decompression stops as non-decompression dives.