Iantd Advanced Nitrox or DSAT Apprentice Tec Diver

[6474286]

Darlene,

Thankyou for your comments, and apologies for not responding sooner! I started to reply to you, whilst I was at work, but things got a little busy and I never managed to respond.

Well anyway, Thankyou for the comments, they have proved extremely useful, and I have decided to take the Tec Rec route.

With regards to the instructor, I am very lucky to have an instructor who I can easily get on with and whose instruction I find very good.

Thanks again

Paul

 

[Scuba_Vixen]

It's a good course. I think it was Pez De Diablo that related in detail how the class went on the decostop board. If you do a search, I'm sure you could find it.

As far as gas switch extended no decompresion dives: What they mean is simply changing gasses to a higher O2 percentage as you do shallower parts of the dive so you have an overall longer NDL time than you would have if using only bottom mix. It would work well on a wall dive with a reef at the top, or a wreck with a lot of structure to check out significantly shallower than the portion on the bottom. An example might be: dive the wall at 120' on 30%, then ascend to the coral heads and canyons between them at the top of the wall at 80' and switch to 40%, then work back towards shallower reef at 40' and switch to 60%. You could make that a no stop dive, and it would definately be longer than you'd get on the bottom mix (30%) alone. Does it make a lot of sense? Probably not. I'm sure it has more to do with not imposing an overhead (deco) on those with less than the required prerequisite experience and rescue training to take the full course although they do get the gas switch training and practice that will be used for deco in the future.

The difference between the apprentice tec and tec deep diver are in the prerequisites and the type of proceedures certified.

Prereq. differences:
Apprentice tec doesn't require rescue cert.
Apprentice tec requires only half the logged dives

Certification differences:
Apprentice can Not do deco dives
Apprentice depth limit is 130'...same as recreational
Tec Deep Can do deco and accellerated deco (meaning higher O2 than the bottom gas) dives
Tec Deep depth limit is 165'

I can't intelligently see starting this kind of training without the course and dive experience prerequisites for the Tec Deep Diver cert, but we all have our own opinions.

Hope that filled in some blanks for those not familliar with the courses.


Darlene

 

[Scuba_Vixen]

Apprentice tec can only use up to 60% O2, Tec Deep can use up to 100%.

Again, the logic escapes me, unless it's the thought that 60% can be a reasonable bottom mix, but anything higher is "for deco use only".