PADI TecRec standards

[ginti]

Hi everyone!

I tried to look for some PADI TecRec reports, but couldn't find any here.

Basically, I am interested in the procedures taught during the courses up to TecRec 50, especially:
- emphasis on basic skills (trim/buoyancy/team awareness)
- team vs solo mentality
- safety drill
- valve drill
- gas management, specifically:
A) standard vs optimum gases?
B) how do they choose the gas? (END, O2 toxicity, etc.)
C) deco calculation (software on the PC? deco tables? diving watch/computer?)

I may dive soon in a PADI TecRec dive centre, and I just would like to know what to expect from the divers. Sure, first dive is going to be shallow and I am going to discuss with them pre-dive, and I'll also ask to do some exercises... But I still think it is better to know in advance

If I remember well, @mc42 took some courses on this route and @boulderjohn teaches them, right? Anyone else here who can help me?

Thanks

 

[rddvet]

@Capt Jim Wyatt Teaches padi Tec courses. My understanding is he teaches to much higher than the standards, but can probably give you an idea of what an average tec50 diver should have been taught

 

[JBFG]

It really depends on where you are and what who your instructor is.

For me, my instructor was super anal about trim, propulsion, stability in the water, gas switch, and planning!

Bubble check was always conducted with S drill at the beginning of the dives, during, and at the end during the stop(s) sometimes. my instructors was terrible as gas management as he always seems to be out of air when I was not looking or paying attention (especially upside down in a hatch lol!).

As for which gas, we used best mix for deco which was aligned with our first stop generally. This is common practice we’re we were in but not necessarily true everywhere. For example I heard that instructors in Florida prefer to teach standard mixes, but I could be wrong.

for deco software, my instructor was flexible. I used subsurface and be used deco something. We both compared and adjusted until we had a match plan (and by we i mean I adjusted to match his plan lol).
We dove the deco plan that we had which matched perfectly our perdix and had tables made for backup.

again the instructor here is the key, not the agency!

je peux t’écrire ça en français si tu veux

 

[ginti]

je peux t’écrire ça en français si tu veux

Thanks!

I am Italian - but feel free to write as you want, I can understand

I am not interested in the course itself, since I am already trained with another agency, but with very little experience after the course. That's going to be the first time I do tech dives with people I do not know (which is why I will probably start with one easy shallow rec-dive), so I'd like to understand what I should discuss with them before to dive

I am particularly interested in the minimum standard actually...

A quick question, how do you calculate the optimum gas? I assume you first find the deepest deco stop, and then you calculate the deco gas based on END and ppO2 right? The same for the bottom gas? What are the acceptable END and ppO2?

 

[boulderjohn]

- emphasis on basic skills (trim/buoyancy/team awareness)
- team vs solo mentality
- safety drill
- valve drill
- gas management, specifically:
A) standard vs optimum gases?
B) how do they choose the gas? (END, O2 toxicity, etc.)
C) deco calculation (software on the PC? deco tables? diving watch/computer?)

--Divers are taught to dive in teams, but at the same time they should be self-sufficient. You should be able to finish a dive on your own if separated. The team provides an extra measure of safety, but that extra measure should never be needed.
--You will need to hold deco stops within a pretty strict range. On some dives you will have to perform a valve drill during a deco stop without losing control of the depth.
--Safety drills by sharing with a long hose are important, although there are now variations allowed during Covid.
--Valve drill is an emphasis. It is required many times, with a time limit of 45 seconds for back mount--30 seconds for sidemount.
A. Not standard gases. When I had students cross over from UTD, PADI had no set policy on the crossover requirements and had to look up the UTD requirements. The fact that UTD used standard gases was a factor, because it indicated they had not had to make decisions about gas usage. You do not have to have best mix--just one that works and you can defend.
B. Yes, that's how you choose your gas.
C. You first learn to do deco by hand, using a special slate on which you plan your ascent and work manually through gas usage, CNS, etc. You can use desktop software to determine stop times, but after that it is manual. Of course, with modern software, you are essentially recreating on the slate a slightly different version of what you see on the computer screen. You need to be able to input your SAC rate on the slate for the planning.

Each step of the course begins with shallow skill sessions, then you get progressively deeper. Although you are taught to do accelerated deco, on the actual dives you dive as if you are on backgas for the deco, even though you are using a mix for accelerated deco. This means your deco mix provides an extra layer of safety. That is for the training dives only; it is assumed you will accelerate on your own dives.

The PADI program is in some ways the opposite of TDI or IANTD. I was originally trained TDI, and I was originally a TDI tech instructor. I went through the Intro to Advanced Nitrox to Deco procedures linear process, which means we did not learn anything about decompression procedures until the last course. With the PADI design, the decompression information comes early in the course. The information comes right away, and it comes in a load. When you get to the Tec 50 class, there is almost no new learning. The focus on that class is learning to use two deco gases.

PADI does stress decision making. Students are supposed to plan the dives after the initial shallow skill dives. I make sure my students understand deco theory and what the alternatives are for deco plans. They know all about the debates over deep stops, for example, and they make decisions as to what they will do. If you ask them why they are following a specific deco plan rather than another plan, they can tell you precisely why, and it is not due to reasons handed to them. In contrast, when I was learning TDI, my instructor taught us to plan dives using Ratio Deco. We had no choice. (Even though this is not part of the TDI curriculum, it was perfectly fine with them--I checked.) Then we switched over to UTD, and the UTD version of Ratio Deco was absolutely required. That was all we knew.

 

[boulderjohn]

I forgot to mention that both TDI and PADI now allow the instructor to change the order on which dives are done in the instructional sequence. You do not have to go through Tec 40 then Tec 45 then Tec 50. You can treat it as a continuous course. This provides a benefit for course planning, since the shallow skill dives have different site requirements than the deco dives. It is now possible to do skill dives for two courses on the same day and then do the deeper dives at another site on another day.

 

[rjack321]

I have exactly one dive with a PADI tec 40/45/50 instructor - I invited him along to scooter two wrecks here which require a national park service permit and I had an extra space on the permit. The first wreck is at 200ft (60m), the second about 3 minutes away on the scooter at 170ft (50m), then 3 mins back and up the steep beach for deco. I was on CCR so I have quite a bit of flexibility on the deco but still. Water temp is about 38F (5-6C), really good visibility of 30+m at this site thankfully. To say it was a "mess" is perhaps an understatement.

He had a weight integrated jacket BC (no tow strap)
I dont recall his exact regulator setup, but there were hoses everywhere
A slate with his dive plan on his wrist
Double AL80s with 15/26 in them (probably the most bizarre mix I have ever heard of for a 60m dive)
Al80 of 40% on the left
Al40 of O2 on the right
Bottles were not marked with MOD visible to me, but it was on the tape on the neck instead, I dont recall how they were clipped off but they hung extremely low as you might expect from a jacket BC.

I did the dive with him (and had 2 other CCR buddies), the three of us on CCR were definitely babysitting this PADI tec instructor the whole time. He did run low quickly on the double 80s (as you might expect on a 55m average dive even if its short) and had to ascend above everyone else on the way back to make his 40% switch so he didn't go OOA.

I found out afterwards that he has only done deco dives at the one deep beach training site the PADI program uses north of Seattle. For all his classes and his PADI tec IDC that was the only site he's done >40m. He was actually pretty excited to have dove something else so I guess that was a positive. Thank god we didnt have to do a free ascent from these wrecks.

@ginti my advice is to start at the heads of your new French buddies and go down asking how EVERYTHING is done and exactly what their plan is for everything. My lone experience was with a PADI Tec instructor. I have no idea what his students might look like - but expect anything and everything.

 

[boulderjohn]

That's right, because if you have seen one bad guy violating all the standards, all the rest in the world must totally suck! Better stay away from a total piece of **** like me!

 

[Landau]

Isn't the real issue here doing a tech dive with unfamiliar Tech divers for the first time?

If you were not trained by the shop the others might not have either. And as others have said above "It's the instructor not the agency" - I'd worry more about getting to know your team and all getting on the same expectations and dive plan more that what the standards of the shop's agency are.

There are several thing I do on my personal dives (Rec- I'm not a tech diver) that I do differently than I did in my training. My self check and buddy check doesn't involve the PADI BWRAF mnemonic for instance

 

[rjack321]

That's right, because if you have seen one bad guy violating all the standards, all the rest in the world must totally suck! Better stay away from a total piece of **** like me!

Oh well, you can take it personally if you want, nothing I can do about that.

It wasn't you, you weren't mentioned, my experience had nothing to do with you. But somehow you make it about you.

Isn't the real issue here doing a tech dive with unfamiliar Tech divers for the first time?

If you were not trained by the shop the others might not have either. And as others have said above "It's the instructor not the agency" - I'd worry more about getting to know your team and all getting on the same expectations and dive plan more that what the standards of the shop's agency are.

There are several thing I do on my personal dives (Rec- I'm not a tech diver) that I do differently than I did in my training. My self check and buddy check doesn't involve the PADI BWRAF mnemonic for instance

This is true, I was merely reinforcing the point that there is a spectrum of possible expectations. That dive just happened to be one of my biggest WTF shocks and seemed relevant to Ginti's circumstances. It's only an N = 1