Come down, back to earth with your feet!!! That is your personal view.
Correct, but given that this is a
comments thread, relating to my article, that is natural surely?
I've never attempted to imply that these were anything more than a personal view. I have, however, attempted to justify that view, on the basis of available training, 20 years of personal multi-agency experience and a common-sense argument that 'training should equate activity'.
Don't you think that all the agencies which are teaching Rec Deco consider their programs being safe and prudent?
What they consider safe and prudent is irrelevant. There's a dozen factors that could influence their 'considerations', many of which are not necessarily rooted in the best interests of the student divers.
I'd be interested in what a legal system would consider 'safe and prudent'.
I'd also be interested to know why those agencies believed it was 'safe and prudent', when they also offer technical courses to accomplish the same goals.
I'd also be interested to know how something considered 'safe and prudent' based on the diving training system in the 1970's can now still be considered safe and prudent' 40 years later, when the scuba training community has evolved beyond anything that was available, or known, 4 decades ago.
And in fact these dives are done to thousends every year worldwide with a signifcant low number of decompression incidents. I am quite sure, the number of incidents amongst Tec divers is much higher.
Can you supply any statistics to support that claim? Or are we just going to fly in a realm of assumption and fantastical hypothesis?
I don't think the UK has a 'significantly low number of decompression incidents'. For a small diving population, diving infrequently, the statistics far outweigh those from much more high volume diving locations (where, incidentally, divers aren't permitted to do rec deco). The UK has more DCI incidents in a summer month that the whole of the Philippines has in a year. In the Philippines, deco is the preserve of technically trained divers. Same for Thailand, Malaysia etc. Very few dive operations would allow deco without appropriate technical training and equipment.
And - as a lawyer myself - I don't share your legal concerns too!
Then you can supply some precedent and/or explanation of how conducting deco dives, without deco training, is safe and prudent?
I'm not sure I ever learned why my instructor felt that diving doubles + stage (all containing the same bottom mix) necessarily means technical diving. I assume it had to do with the additional level of complexity introduced.
I think that back in the early/mid-90's, 'technical' was just about anything that wasn't specifically taught in a rec training class. This was a time when several agencies were still wrestling themselves into acceptance of nitrox as a 'safe' backgas for rec use... when trimix was in its infancy and few formal training courses existed to train for it... A lot changed in 20 years.