Next step / possible training to pursue

[Cdncoldwater]

IANTD offers deep deco with 10 minutes of back gas to 130', which might be a good option. It has rec essentials and AOW as pre reqs. Though it and the rec essentials might be less common than deep.

Yes, I saw that but I need the rec essentials (not sure what that entails) but I will look into it more as I may have courses that cross over such as Rescue and Solo.

 

[MichaelMc]

but I need the rec essentials (not sure what that entails)

Buoyancy, trim, balance and propulsion. Frog, reverse, helicopter, breathing, team.

Similar general area as GUE Fundies but back or sidemount.

Deep + rec trimix is likely easier to get scheduled and would be useful instruction and card.

You could also do the 'organize a class' thing and convince a few friends to take rec essentials class with your local instructor.

 

[Wibble]

It’s not always about max depth diving. It’s more about maximising your bottom time.

How about a 30m/100' dive. On air you’ve got 20 mins NDL. On 32% you get 30 mins NDL. Take a small deco stage of 80% with 32% backgas and you can easily get 60 mins on the bottom with 20 mins deco, or 40 mins deco on backgas. As long as your SAC is reasonable, there’s plenty in reserve.

Given the effort to get in the water, who wouldn’t want to maximise their bottom time?



(Years ago, when diving with a twinset of 32% and also diving with a DiveMaster candidate, we had that one day of extremely rare stunning 20m visibility on a 30m/100' wreck. Amazing to see the sheer size of the wreck in front of us. My buddy thumbed the dive at 20 mins as he was on air. Obviously not at all happy, but did as I was told and we surfaced.

As a result of that dive I went down the technical and solo path. Nowadays I’d run that as a 75 min bottom time with two stages — actually it would be two hours runtime on a rebreather carrying two bailout stages)

 

[TMHeimer]

Number of dives is meaningless drivel mostly said to impress novices, but it grates with experienced divers.

Number of dives is not to impress anybody. It's just a stat. It's not something I throw out to impress novices, particularly since I have been diving solo the last 5 years. It can be just a number, or a goal, like myself having started diving in '05 and hoping to reach 1,000 dives in 2023 just before I turn 70. When I retired in 1996 (age 42), my financial advisor said I will need "goals", and I have never had a problem with that. My OW instructor in 2005 asked why we signed up for the course and I said "I'm a shell collector". Years later I became a working PADI Divemaster, assisting with OW courses, which was very rewarding.
I am sorry "number of dives" grates with you and your "experienced" divers. You encourage divers to call you out when you use words like "drivel". How's it goin' with England & Denmark? Let's Go Mets!
My dive today was in rough surf to a depth of 15 feet. I COUNTED it.

Sorry, I had a bad day diving. FOUR equipment mishaps. So I vented. But still confused about what you say about number of dives. Just a stat-- means nothing. We Northern (well relatives) Scots shouldn't argue. My family is from Sanday, Orkney and Rogart, Scotland (birthplace of Sir John A. MacDonald, father of Canadian Federation and first Prime Minister.

 

[Wibble]

When we go through schooling we pass through distinct phases as we learn new skills. Infants and junior school where we learn the basics (up to 7th grade?). Then through secondary school where we use those basic skills to do advanced work. We all looked up to the superior skills of our junior years tutors, maybe realising later in life that those skills were nothing special.

The point being that we’re measured by different standards as we progress through life. Of course metaphors don’t withstand close scrutiny.

More advanced skills and equipment opens up amazing opportunities which are just not available until we’ve developed those skills. These could be deeper, longer, overhead — all requiring specialist equipment and advanced skills that just weren’t available to us in our early careers. Even diving with a whole new class of other skilled people.

Those wrecks/caves/locations are amazing. Far more pristine and intact. Diving these makes all the expense, training and skills development efforts so worthwhile.

 

[Heat Miser]

Of course there's plenty of great PADI TecNN instructors who specialise in technical and other advanced courses (PPB). However, there will also be instructors who rarely teach those courses, spend their diving career with complete novices and rarely dive in an "advanced mode".

I think its the catch-22 of the dive industry professional. Do you want to sell equipment and eat or do you want to specialise in Tech and have another source of income. I admire tech instructors that have made a good go of it, the pyramid of customers has greatly diminished.

 

[tomcatbubba]

I think its the catch-22 of the dive industry professional. Do you want to sell equipment and eat or do you want to specialise in Tech and have another source of income. I admire tech instructors that have made a good go of it, the pyramid of customers has greatly diminished.

I'm not one of those instructors, and when you consider everything that goes into teaching a Tec course properly, I don't know how it is a money maker for most people. When I figure out how many hours it takes to teach Tec40 properly, dives, gas fills, lodging and miles to the dive site, entrance and boat fees, insurance (pro and medical) and gear (rebuilds, VIPs, hydros, inspections etc.) I would be better off working at Burger King. I'd make more money per hour, and incur less risk. I can do a little better with Tec45 and 50, as by that point, especially if they were a prior student, they are more squared away and typically take less time to get through the course.

 

[Wibble]

I think its the catch-22 of the dive industry professional. Do you want to sell equipment and eat or do you want to specialise in Tech and have another source of income. I admire tech instructors that have made a good go of it, the pyramid of customers has greatly diminished.

Alas, these are precisely the instructors which one should avoid like the plague when doing technical training.

Once you've completed your Rescue Diver, you've reached the end of PADI's core competences. Whilst there's undoubtedly some instructors teaching the TecNN courses who are highly competent, your aim when you open the technical diving "door" is to get the best training you can. This inevitably means finding instructors who pretty much only teach technical courses and who are active in technical diving circles.

You travel to them and you pay good money for their coaching. You would also expect to be coached throughout your diving career by these people, i.e. they don't just specialise in the entry-level technical diving syllabus; they teach the advanced courses too. Would also expect these people to write courses and be active in their agencies.

In other words, a whole different class of instructors with far higher standards and experience than you've been used to in recreational diving.

 

[NothingClever]

It’s a well-considered diagram, and thank you for sharing!

I give all credit to @RainPilot and @LandonL . RainPilot in the UAE helped me mature the ideas and thoughts into tangible knowledge, skills and attributes. Unfortunately, COVID-19 squashed our opportunity to train together. But as a seasoned dive leader with a global network, he referred me to Landon in Florida for my Trimix course. The first thing Landon did was a dryland interview of my intentions. He already (obviously) had an established battery of questions but the chart proved useful to accelerate the conversation. Landon’s endorsement of the chart as a long range training plan FOR ME was validating.

 

[Azraelien]

My experience of Tech instruction was ******* awesome - probably one of the most rewarding courses I've taken, and not necessarily a 'now you must continue to tech' type deal - in fact, half the class just took the courses so they would feel more safe diving redundant on rec dives.

As a quick rundown, I took about a year of training that was 'Sidemount/Overhead Sidemount/Intro to Tech' basically taught as one course - We had a mixed team of sidemount and backmount divers (they did 'Doubles/overhead doubles/intro to tech'), and covered stage handling, deco procedures, blind navigation and emergencies, blind OOG situations, general problem solving and so on.

I expected, coming from rec diving, that there would be like... distinct parts of these courses, with a card at the end of each (i.e you do 6 dives and now you have a Sidemount card) but actually it all basically ran together, and for about a year, with maybe 25 class dives and 80 odd 'training' dives we just continued building skills more and more and more, and the 'problem solving' components got harder and harder - dive 1 of sidemount was like 'here is how you share air', whereas class dive 25 was more like 'ok you and your buddy are placed inside a sunken VW Golf and blindfolded. The instructor shuts off buddy's air, and now you have to figure out how to get out of the Golf, recover the stages left outside clipped to the line, follow the line back to the training platform while air sharing, then do 3 levels of simulated deco stops' 'oh and your stage regulator just broke as well'

If you'd told me that I was going to do the activities from dive 25 on day one, I would have just laughed. but a year later we just kinda shrugged and did it because we knew how to.

Obviously when I took Cave 1 straight after, a lot of the diving skills were already ingrained to the point where we were able to focus a lot more on just specific cave skills instead of basics, which is exactly WHY our instructor teaches intro to tech like that.

I would absolutely recommend taking such a course if you want a bit of a challenge, and to KNOW that you know how to solve problems underwater - as well as to get the most out of your sidemount rig...