Gear followed the mass market and became less and less quality. By the early to mid-1990's, pieces of BCD's were breaking around me, Dacor second stage covers were littering the bottoms of popular dive sites and training areas, and nitrox hit the scene! At first, PADI wanted to squash nitrox as a death gas and threatened to eject anyone who mentioned the word, "Nitrox," at DEMA faster than the TSA would eject someone who said the word, "Bomb," from the airport. However, Brett Gilliam of TDI, Tom Mount of IANTD, Dick Rutkowski, "The Father of Nitrox" and others didn't care. They talked about it, and people listened -even PADI eventually.
Meanwhile, divers were still wreck and cave diving with what gear worked and often making their own when the manufacturers woudn't since diving had forgotten them; much the same way that women and minority groups were still continuing to make great historical strides that no one talked about. The wreck and cave divers were simply making whatever modifications to the "recreational" gear that was needed to "recreate" in wrecks and caves more seriously than what the industry had been turning diving into since Jacqueline Bisset thrilled everyone with her white T-shirt in The Deep. "The Deep" had become 70 feet. Anyone going past 130 feet was dangerous. The reason 130 feet became the recreational limit is because the old double hose regulators got a little wonky at that depth, so the US Navy decided that was the limit for a scuba diver and a hard hat diver could still go incredibly deep. Also, the first ascent rate in diving was 60 feet per minute. A lot of science went into that. The scuba divers wanted to swim up at 120 feet per minute because they could. The hardhate tenders wanted to crank at 30 feet per minute because it was work. The Navy didn't want to make separate tables and split the difference. Scuba guys, slow down! Hard hat guys ... crank, boys, crank! Later, with so many recreational divers getting bent within the tables, studies showed recreational divers were going as fast, if not faster, than 120 feet per minute! Studies also showed that 60 feet per minute and times on the tables might be too aggressive. Everyone S-L-O-W down.
Diving became interested in science again to prevent recreational divers from getting hurt, the industry wondered how select groups of people were diving so deep on air and trimix and not dying. It was now okay to talk about it. Thanks to the Internet, one could find out about how much technical diving was talked and not read the fluff in the magazines.
The world met George Irvine III, the Woodville Karst Plain Project Director, who was telling people how to "Do It Right." George was a very quiet, very soft-spoken individual ... NOT! Thanks to the famous G-isms, George, or "Trey" as his friends know him, had epic Internet battles with those whose equipment and methods were not quite safe, sound and resulted in many deaths. The philosophy of DIR, the better training of GUE, and the constant improvement on wings, lights, gases, methods, etc., created a safer sounder diving universe. DIR is as recreational as it is technical.
Some of the better wings available to cave divers in the late 70's and early 80's were made by SeaTec which manufactured one of the first jacket BCD's. The problem with the SeaTec wing is that it has too much lift for a recreational diver and too little for a steel tank cave diver. The inflator is also in a poor place attached at the top left. I have one. George had one listed in one of his first equipment lists. He recommended moving the inflator to the center. They also wanted a more robust wing. GUE and WKPP approached several manufacturers who declined to make what they needed. Jarrod Jablonski, WKPP diver and GUE president, created Halcyon to meet the needs the manufacturers told them no one wanted. One of the very first wings was an 18 lb. lift bat wing for recreational diving. The idea was so simple, it is amazing that with back inflation going back decades in recreational diving, no one thought of a smaller more streamlined BCD - especially to be worn by underwater models to make BCD's more attractive, less obvious and better sell the image of the sport.
Things became so bad with both equipment image and design, kids used to tell me that they thought divers looked lame. They didn't wanted to dive and look stupid. I remember, as a kid, how cool divers looked! Yeah, the kids were right, especially when Mares ran the add on the back of Skin Diver Magazinewith a multi-colored 80's paint splash pattern on the gear, Harlequinn-like neon blocks all over a wetsuit and day-glow everything. I personally think that's when 20,000 or so divers left the sport and when Skin Diver died. By the way, my brother, a motorcycle, ATV and jet ski racer had already repainted his stuff away from the paint splash pattern, with two other trendy schemes, by the time the diving industry thought paint splash was cool!
GUE began making gear. Black is cheap, so I would guess many things were black just based on cost. It was needed for exploration. Function was important. At the same time, black was "in" in society. While the diving industry was still manufacturing Miami Vice neon and pastel plastic junk, better things were on the way. There was little difference in anything made by GUE in function that wasn't on Lloyd Bridges or nearly any other diver in the late 1950's and early 1960's except a BCD and an SPG. The recommended DIR fin is a rubber fin and a design that goes back 30 or 40 years! It works - WELL! The isolation manifolds of today are better, but manifolds were in use and popular on doubles and advertised in magazines into the early 1980's - when the resort rage hit.
While the gear of today is improved, watching old recreational diving movies, television shows and looking at old pictures there is nothing, including necklaced regulators and long hoses, that divers in the 50's, 60's and 70's were using that you can't point to an item and and see today's counterpart on a DIR/Hogarthian rig. That old stuff was good quality. It worked. Good quality gear was used by the technical community because when you are doing dives that are cutting edge, you need good stuff, not cheap junk marketed as, "the way to dive" by the same corporate mentally that brings you McDonald's burgers and posterboard craftsmanship. The "good stuff" was the same recreational gear used by everyone for 3 or 4 decades, forgotten by the general public while diving leaped into the hype of market-driven training, manufacturing, and advertising. The "technical" equipment of today is just improved upon old designs or in the case of some things such as ScubaPro Jet Fins - completely unchanged. Yet, my dive center sells the "Jet" style designs such as OMS Slipstreams and XS fins as "tech fins". They once used to be called "power fins" because they do just that, give you power in comparison to the softer blade "flippers" as children call them and still wear. By the way, instead of paying $180.00 for a floppy split fin, just buy some old Voit Vikings or Dacor Cordas on E-bay for $5.00.
Now, diving gets to be divided between recreational, technical and worse ... "techreational". Can we PLEASE tar and feather the person who came up with that last one?
The term "technical diving" was coined by Michael Menduno, the publisher of AquaCorps magazine in the early 90's. It was meant to describe diving that was often done for sport, but wasn't commercial, scientific or military in nature, yet had similar complexities and challenges to these endeavors.
WHAT HE REALLY MEANT WAS ... in the "invisible" sport of scuba diving these divers are not the poster children for the DO NOT BE THAT GUY type in the Mares ad. They have standards for training, diving and for stuff they'd BE CAUGHT DEAD IN, because ... well ... you might be.
So, if the instructor tells you that a backplate and wing is technical gear is not allowed in class pull out an old copy of a PADI Open Water Manual even as late as 1990 (my copy), and look at all the pictures of recreational divers in back packs, harnesses and back inflation wings.
If you get crap out not having a quick release, loosen the straps as one person advised.
The industry blew it when they turned away the divers who wanted to improve good gear for the time, with innovative changes and advances, that will meet the greater challenges of continuing exploration. Now, it's trying to catch up. The terms, "technical" and "recreational" help them to continue to market the lowest quality products or to design over-priced toys for the market and keep people buying them.
Gear is gear. Diving is diving. When you dive, use the proper tools for the job.
