Please give me some instructor advice!

[Beau Holden]

I guess my concern is my local area is all 0 viability silted up shipping lanes so I'd like to do some learning to give me a platform to then do more advanced diving with experienced groups. All my diving is on holiday (1-3 weeks per year).

Please know I am not being judgemental of you or your diving. I glad there is another diver looking to advance and do more challenging dives. Many of us have been right where you are now and have made many mistakes along the way and had some wonderful times and made some great friends.

After reading @SlugMug s post, please understand below 40 meters things really start to get interesting when things go bad. You had better be ultra serious and ready for the chore of getting back to the surface. Things get a lot different at 60 meters when it goes bad and you might as well be in a cavern or cave as the surface may not be readily available to you. Like I said it took me 2 years and that was diving 30 to 40 dives many months. But when it was done, I could hold my own and my buddy did not worry, If I needed to get him out of the cave or to the surface. Its all your choice and decision. Please just make the right one. I promise you, there is nothing at 60 meters worth loosing your life over or that of your buddy.

I will shut up now and get off my soap box. Please have fun and enjoy your diving.

 

[Marie13]

All the serious tech divers I know dive locally/regionally as well as on trips away. And they dive often. I try for once a month in the winter, even if it’s just a pool session, to keep the rust off. Only diving 1-3 weeks a year? I can’t even get my head around that.

1-3 weeks of diving a year isn’t enough to keep higher levels skills where they need to be.

 

[Imla]

I'd firstly like to chime in with the others here. Spending this much time on a technical focus when your realistic frequency of diving is that low, would in my opinion be to do yourself and your buddies a disservice. However, that said. If you are set on doing technical classes, I would recommend

Sameh Sokar from Scuba Seekers in Dahab
They offer both TDI and GUE.

Sameh Sokar-Technical & CCR Instructor

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Scuba Seekers Dahab – Your adventure starts here

 

[SlightlySlanty]

Hello All,

On local area, I am in the north west of England so I have pretty good access to Wales. I bought the dry suit to give me diving options in the UK, but have so far only been to stoney cove. Most of the UK diving that appeals is fairly shallow (kelp, seals etc), though I will probably do a Scapa Flow trip at some point.

On finding local mentors: This feels like good advice, I will start looking into my local BSAC club.

On what I want to get out of diving: It is my favourite thing to do, but I rarely have the opportunity outside dedicated trips. I totally see your point about wanting to get into tec, while not actually diving that often. The image I had in my head was doing 1 week trips, spending the first few days knocking the rust off, and then being ready to do some ~50m deco stuff towards the end. I normally get back into the swing of diving within the first few minutes even if I haven’t been in the water for a year. That said, I might be being totally naive about the required step up in skill.

On the tec diving that appeals: Thanks for prompting some thought here, what I am really looking for is to have more options:

• If there is a cool site at 45m I’d like to be able to stay there for 30 minutes instead of the current 3-4.
• There are also some bucket list sites such as the Blue Hole arch and some of the aircraft wrecks around Malta which are too dangerous to do without tec training. I am unlikely to do any of these dives without a guide.
• I have no interest in wreck or cave penetration, I have done cavern diving (cenotes) and a reasonable amount of recreational level small wreck penetration and while interesting I much prefer being out in the open.
• Lastly, I don’t think I’ll go anywhere near trimix; the extra cost just doesn’t add up for me. I know this nullifies my previous comment about the 50-60m range, except maybe with TDI extended range.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts and advice, the truth is I don’t know enough to judge whether what I want is realistic, and I totally see @Beau Holden 's point about not pushing limits just to see something.

Thanks for the Scuba Seekers recommendation.

 

[SlugLife]

I normally get back into the swing of diving within the first few minutes even if I haven’t been in the water for a year.

This sentence stood out, so I'm perhaps being nitpicky (since I agree with most of the rest of the post). The problem is usually you don't know what you've forgotten. I'll give you a personal example:

About 1.5 years ago, I was on a dive and suddenly there were LOTS of bubbles in my face. So, I try to find my octo and after a few seconds of not finding it (bubbles in face& dangling somewhere), and being about 30ft from the surface, I decide surfacing is the best option. When I get back to the boat, I discover my 2nd stage is gone, somewhere on the bottom of the lake, apparently having come unscrewed. (And I couldn't find it on a subsequent dive).

A couple immediate lessons were, that I was severely unpracticed switching regulators, didn't know where my octo was, and really needed to look into ways of securing (retainers, clips, etc) my regulators. Then when I did practice regulator switching soon after, on the shore, I was quickly reminded of another lesson, that I needed to hit the purge button when switching (or breathe out first), after breathing in a very small amount of water. This was about 2-months into the dive-season, with about 2 dive about every 10 days.

The point of this story, is to highlight a very basic open-water skill that become neglected, and I had no idea it was neglected.

Lastly, I don’t think I’ll go anywhere near trimix; the extra cost just doesn’t add up for me. I know this nullifies my previous comment about the 50-60m range, except maybe with TDI extended range.

If you're traveling to places like Blue Hole, I'd have to imagine the extra cost of trimix is significantly less than the cost of travel (hotels, flights, etc).

Anyway, I think you might instead want to start expanding your search for interesting sites. I mean sure, there are some very well-known sites (ex: Oriskany, Blue Hole) that get more media attention, and are just outside or at the depth range of an average recreational diver, but there are plenty of options well within recreational limits.

 

[Marie13]

On what I want to get out of diving: It is my favourite thing to do, but I rarely have the opportunity outside dedicated trips. I totally see your point about wanting to get into tec, while not actually diving that often. The image I had in my head was doing 1 week trips, spending the first few days knocking the rust off, and then being ready to do some ~50m deco stuff towards the end. I normally get back into the swing of diving within the first few minutes even if I haven’t been in the water for a year. That said, I might be being totally naive about the required step up in skill.

Rarely have the opportunity or rarely make the time? If you want to do this level of diving, you must make the time to get dives in. It’s either a priority or it’s not.

 

[KevinNM]

Start in your local area. In my opinion traveling to start technical dive training is not the place to start. There is so much on learning skills and procedures to start with. I would learn and begin practice first.

One of the critical issues with that is that if you have never dived with someone with skills of a good tech instructor you have no idea what skills to learn or even what a tech diver should look like in the water. Once you understand that they are really serious that (for example) you need to be able to hover flat and in place without changing depth or moving more than your fin-tips for minutes, and someone shows you that this is in fact totally possible, you can’t even start to understand the skills needed, much less how to practice them.

Once you understand where your skills are vs where they need to be then you can start to work on them. Waterproof gopros are really helpful then to understand what you are really doing.

 

[TimPB]

If you're in NW UK, the west coast of Scotland isn't too far away. I'm in Soith Yorkshire and travel up about once a month, as well as regular Yorkshire coast stuff in summer.

There's some great stuff in the Clyde and Oban isn't that much further. There's also the lake district. Wastwater, ullswater and Crummock all have dive sites.

Join a club. Best thing I did to advance my diving. Try a few and find one that fits. They arent all the same.

 

[rddvet]

Start in your local area. In my opinion traveling to start technical dive training is not the place to start. T

I think alot of us would disagree completely. In many of our opinions, the quality of instruction is by far and large the most important part. There are MANY very bad tech instructors in the world, and a newb to technical diving would have no way to spot them. Even some of the "big names" are horrible instructors.
What my advice is to people wanting to get into tech diving is to ask around for recommendations. Then start narrowing the list by asking questions to others who know of that particular instructor or reaching out to the instructor with questions. The very basics of technical diving are something that if not taught right from the get go will haunt you through your diving career.
It's not about where you learn, it's about the quality of the instructor. Once you have the skills and training, you can find local mentors to give advice for dealing with local conditions.
If you got to travel to learn, it is what it is. The juice is worth the squeeze.

 

[Vicko]

If I understand correctly you are interested in some form of accelerated deco training with no trimix.
Some people in this forum are severely overestimating the complexity of those dives and the required training and skills to do them. 90% of the skills you need are available to open water divers.
The rest is nerdy math and muscle memory that get's built and maintained with use. 3 weeks of diving a year is 21 days, that's way more than most tec divers I encounter have.
Go do some diving, do a couple intro to tec dives, see what you prefer and what not and then make a decision.