Question How to prepare for tech diving without diving?

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Will Megginson

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Messages
22
Reaction score
15
Location
Maryland / Florida
# of dives
50 - 99
I'm currently in college and will not be able to dive until spring break due to cold water in our main dive site. I'm currently PADI AOW and SDI Nitrox certified and am very interested in getting into tech. My ultimate goal is to get my cave certification but that is a long way off. (I caught the bug in Key Largo doing some of the long swim throughs on one of the reefs.)

I'm signed up for TDI Intro to Tech on spring break and am really looking forward to it. For the rest of the spring semester, I will just be doing rec diving in the quarry (rescue cert) and potentially off-shore wreck diving in NC. My dive club kind of churns out DM's so I will probably enter that program just to get experience helping other divers and increasing my situational awareness.

Other than the e-learning for my intro to tech, what books, videos, websites, etc. can I read or learn from in the off-season? I've been reading up on this forum, but I'm always looking for ways to better myself as a diver.
 
Books - "The Six Skills" and "Staying Alive". Both by Steve Lewis.
"The Tao of Survival Underwater" - Tom Mount
"Scuba: A Practical Guide to Advanced Level Training" - By me, James Lapenta
"Technical Diving- An Introduction" and "Deco for Divers" - Both by Mark Powell
"Deep Into Deco" - Asser Salama
"The Technical Diving Handbook" - Gary Gentile

These will do for a start. Though my book is not specifically geared towards tech divers I've been told it provides a good foundation and introduction to things like gas management, gear selection, what you should have gotten out of your AOW class (one of my students called my AOW class an Intro to Tech on steroids) and why you should take rescue before any other training after open water. I don't know about that but there are things in my AOW that aren't even in many Intro to Tech classes.

I'd also strongly suggest picking up copies of what some generally don't think of as text or information books. They are more on the lines of non-fiction novels but I have found that if you actually read them and look for the lessons, they are there. How people came to make the decisions they did and the consequences of those decisions. Most fatalities got their start long before people even got in the water. And it some cases the paths they took years before led to the thing that killed them. Fatal Depth, The Last Dive, Deep Descent, and Death in Number Two Shaft are some to start with.
I also highly recommend "The Aquanaut" by Rick Stanton (He led the Thai Cave Rescue)

I would not count on a DM class increasing your situational awareness unless it's an exceptional one. A technical DM class might because it's focused on supporting technical and expedition divers but the run of the mill recreational DM class? Nah. A good rescue class on the other hand will fundamentally alter your diving and boost your situational awareness. You say your club churns out DM's. That's not necessarily a good thing.

I would also get the books for Intro if you can. e-learning is ok but you can't make notes on the computer screen that you can pull out of your bag when you don't have access to power and refer to them. I have books for all my classes and all of my students get hard copies. A good instructor is going to provide a lot of info that would be handy to note in the margin of your text book. Info that is not in the book and comes from experience.

Also take every opportunity you can to increase your buoyancy and trim skills, and your buddy and buddy communication skills. Work on disciplining yourself to plan dives and stick to those plans. I use a gold bar scenario. I tell my students to imagine we are on a wreck and have a plan with a max depth of 180 ft. Swimming over an opening you look down and see a gold bar 10 feet below, what do you do? Those who answer drop down quick and grab it, fail the question. The correct answer is to note the position and plan a subsequent dive for it. That's the kind of discipline you need for tech diving in the beginning.

A good Intro class will also start with all the ways you can die doing tech diving. Some agencies actually expect the instructor to discourage those who they feel are not ready from starting down the tech path. I start all my classes with a discussion on how diving can kill you and what we are going to do to reduce the risk of that happening.
 
I recommend the Human Factors course by Gareth Lock to all incoming students. It focuses more on the mindset needed for technical diving. It will definitely change some of your thinking.

 
I agree with Jim about DM programs not providing much inherent value, but being a DM will provide you with lots of time in the water (think: free pool time) to practice your own skills, and some time to hone some of your rescue skills.

If you use your time wisely as a DM, it can be quite valuable. If you take SDI's DM you'll get a lot of physics and physiology that will help you academically when you do AN/DP etc.
 
Get a whole bunch of balloons and practice breathing helium?
 
No difference from everything in life ie stay healthy. Easy said than done.
 
Thank you all for the great replies, I stopped by my school's library today and looked for the books recommended. I didn't find any but did come across a few regarding mixed gas diving. I'm assembling a list of books to order and hopefully find cheap copies of (The Tao of Survival Underwater looks particularly interesting, but at $100 it's a tall order). The Essentials of Human Factors in Diving also looks pretty good, and will be going on my list.

As for the physical aspect, I will be adding more focus on squat-like exercises. Squatting 135 isn't too bad for me, but I haven't tried standing up or walking around with the bar, so that will definitely be something to work on.

My instructor here teaches PADI only, so I might register with my shop at home and do the SDI DM program semi-remotely. I'll have to call and find out how that all would work out (can I do some or all of the dives with a PADI instructor and take my signed logs home?). It's the free pool and quarry time that is a big draw as practice with buoyancy and trim are so important.
 
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