spearfisherman55:
Ok, I will stay above 70' until I am older and have more than 100 dives.
Many tech agencies look at a prequisite of 100 dives with 25 below 100 feet for many of their tech courses, so oddly enough they inadvertantly encourage some deeper diving before you are "allowed" to take their more advanced courses.
To advance safely in this sport you need to develop both your experience level and your education level. There are many divers who are heavy on experience but light on training. Worse are the many divers who are heavy on training but have spent very few actual dives outside of one course or another so their independence, their ability to think for themselves and there exposre to real world situations is very limited. They are essentially "patch" divers and usually have a heavily indoctrinated but poorly thought out or developed opinion on everything.
My suggestion would be to get your nitrox certification and a recreational deep diving specialty on the way toward or as part of an AOW certification. You will eventually need this training to progress into tech classes and the AOW/deep diving specialty will expand your depth range to 100-130ft.
Once you get at least 100 dives under your belt, you will then want to take advanced nitrox and deco procedures courses to learn how to properly do decompression diving with proper configuration and redundancy using high percentage nitrox and/or 100% O2 for decompression. You should not be doing any deco without this training.
For pilots, one of the most dangerours periods occurs from 100 hours total time to about 250 hours total time. They "know" they are good pilots but they do not know enough to realize how much they still don't know about flying. They have the confidence to get into some very demanding situations but they do not always have the knowledge or skill to get themselves out of a particular situation nor the good judgement needed to avoid the situation in the first place.
The same thing occurs in the development of a diver. A diver, particulary one with some innate ability and good in water skills, confidence and swimming ability will quickly discover that they can handle a wide range of situations beyond the scope of their training. But what they do not realize is that they can only handle these situations when things go well. When things go wrong, or when the demands of the situation suddenly exceed their knowledge or experience level, they are left trying to develop an immediate solution on the spot and at depth and they have to do it under the influence of at least some degree of narcosis.
If basic diving skills (precise bouyancy control, gas management, etc) are not learned to the degree that they are automatic and if the diver has not had experience and training relating to similar situations and the precognition that occurs during those training and real world experiences, the odds are very small that they will have the neccessary fund of knowledge and available cognitive resources to recognize, anticipate and avoid a problem. Worst case, if a problem fully deveops they will not have the ability to successfully resolve the problem within the very limited time available at depth.
So the best approach is to slowly and incrementally expand your training and experience level concurrently while you slowly expand your depth range and the types of conditions in which you dive (low visbility, night diving, etc). Ideally you need to do this under the mentorship of a more epxerienced diver, dive master or instructor who is aware of your current skill level and will help you continually challenge and expand your abilities without exceeding your ability or pushing you beyond the limits of your ability to handle any situation that may develop.
If you take it slow you will discover that time is on your side and that in 10 years you will be a VERY experienced but still very young 25 year old diver with impressive credentials. You just need to remember that you are not bullet proof, and that while the "Live and Learn" approach works, it only works if you survive each and every dive. So proceed cautiously and hedge your bets with training and incremental progression under the mentorship of a responsible and experienced buddy/DM/instructor.
To borrow another aviation example:
"There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."
The same thing applies to divers.
