Does defining "technical diving" serve any purpose?
- Thread starter Rhone Man
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So public safety diving and mine clearance are recreational? The surface is always an option!
My point: tec/rec is not a complete categorization. Tec diving, by the way, is often recreational by nature.
No, there are numerous types of diving: Recreational (of which Technical is a subset), Military, Scientific, Commercial, and Public Safety. Your examples are not recreational diving.
You are correct of course, but there is a problem with the definitions: A set and its subset have the same label.
In the usual discourse the recreational diving you mention above can be split into two parts: recreational diving and technical diving. This actually happens. Discussing technical vs recreational divers is abundant.
Hence we have a confusion of terms:
- Recreational divers should only perform recreational dives, but technical diving is a form of recreational diving!
- Recreational divers should not perform technical dives. Only tech divers should, but technical divers are nor military/scientific/etc divers but recreational divers.
Context helps us to understand what is meant by "recreational" in each case, but I what if we need to create an index, catalog publications, assign metadata, make things searchable?
Nothing confusing about it
Do you get paid for the diving?
If the answer is NO, then it's recreational (of which as you stated technical diving is a subset).
If the answer is YES, then it's commercial diving!
Fairly straight forward
This is perfectly clear.
The problem becomes apparent when people start to compare technical diving to recreational diving.
They should be writing about technical and non-technical recereational dives, or perhaps basic vs technical recreational dives.
All voluntary, for fun diving is "recreational".
Some recreational diving is technical diving, generally defined as a overhead constraint whether a hard or soft overhead.
One could argue that special backup equipment and techniques to mitigate potential perils — such as redundancy or solo diving — are technical diving even if it’s in a non overhead environment.
Some recreational diving is technical diving, generally defined as a overhead constraint whether a hard or soft overhead.
One could argue that special backup equipment and techniques to mitigate potential perils — such as redundancy or solo diving — are technical diving even if it’s in a non overhead environment.
Hundreds of years ago, the word "nice" meant "silly." You can see it in Romeo and Juliet when Romeo tries to break up the silly argument between Tybalt and Mercutio by telling them the argument is "nice."
So should I be offended if someone today calls me "nice"? Of course not, because I know that definitions of words change over time. It would be downright silly (nice?) of me to insist on that older definition when people today mean something entirely different when they use the term.
Over the past few decades, the general diving public has been using the term "recreational" to refer to diving that is limited to 130 feet or shallower with no overhead environments, and they commonly refer to those requirements as "recreational limits." I suspect (just a guess) that it has a lot to do with PADI's decision to call its set of tables the Recreational Dive Planner. The term "technical diving" emerged around 1990, specifically to describe the kind of diving done that exceeds those recreational limits.
And that is how a huge percentage of the diving population uses those terms. You can rant and rave all you want that there are other definitions of those terms that you like better, but the truth is that is what probably most divers mean when they use those terms.
Additionally, in some circles, the distinction is made in referring to Recreational diving that is not in the subset that is Technical as Sport diving.
I try to impart that understanding to all my students. With the understanding that MOST of the time when they hear someone talk about "recreational diving", they are actually talking about "sport diving".
It rarely seems to be something that is confusing to MOST people. And when it is, it is a point that is easy to clarify.
I try to impart that understanding to all my students. With the understanding that MOST of the time when they hear someone talk about "recreational diving", they are actually talking about "sport diving".
It rarely seems to be something that is confusing to MOST people. And when it is, it is a point that is easy to clarify.
I suggest the problem is oversimplified by discussing the single dimension of rec-to-tech. As someone mentioned earlier, the environment in which you are diving makes a huge difference as to the difficulty of the dive and the training and equipment needed to do the dive. So, the problem is two-dimensional, not one-dimensional. Here is an example of what I mean:
Some dives are in benign environments and require only minimal training and equipment, but others have increasing difficulty driven by the environment (like low viz or high currents) or the overheads (hard or soft). The OW domain is the lower left; the highly technical domain is the upper right. The lower right is the domain of quarries and practice and sometimes boredom and apathy. Where we get into problems is people trying to dive in the upper left.....
Some dives are in benign environments and require only minimal training and equipment, but others have increasing difficulty driven by the environment (like low viz or high currents) or the overheads (hard or soft). The OW domain is the lower left; the highly technical domain is the upper right. The lower right is the domain of quarries and practice and sometimes boredom and apathy. Where we get into problems is people trying to dive in the upper left.....
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