Realistic tec diving goals for a non-professional diver

[rjack321]

Not that bad. Just mild to moderately bad.

class 1 to 2 fun

 

[barth]

diving ccr isn’t really that big of a deal though I’m sure it depends on the unit. But setup and breakdown isn’t bad. I have my own fill station. Now that I dive ccr ai rarely have to fill a bottle other than oxygen. So the 30 minutes to prep my unit offsets the 30 minutes it took to fill bottles for oc. So to me it’s a wash.

This is just my own situation:

Preparing my rebreather taks 30-45 minutes. Cleaning and removing parts takes me 30 minutes.

When I was diving oc nitrox or air I could fill at the local shop in my own town or I could fill near my work. I could wait while filling. Sometimes my set of doubles did stay in my car after diving in a lake. (At a lot of divesites it’s even possible to fill nitrox/air but not pure oxygen.)

For 230 bar oxygen for my rebreather I need a shop with a booster. I have to drive more miles. It’s not possible to wait for filling when there are a lot of customers.

Prebreathing and checks at the divesite takes more time then when I was diving oc. I have to leave earlier at home.

Troubleshooting takes more time with a rebreather, it’s more complicated.

 

[Celt]

No one can tell you what you can or can’t achieve. Years ago my brother who had been spear fishing with me asked to use my tank to try scuba. He went to 30 feet and I swam along over him, the next dive he made to 120 on a wreck and 3 months later he was in Fort Bovisand training commercially. Later the same year he was working in Bahrain on the rigs.

 

[ofg-1]

@ccrprospect. First thing, you can't get agreement here about what "tec" diving really means. Second, you have co-joined the idea of tec diving with rebreathers. Finally, you have people suggesting how many dives per year you need to make to be proficient. To all of this, I say bullsquirt.

This is supposed to be a hobby. Hobbies are supposed to be fun. If you put all of this arbitrary pressure on yourself, you will drive the fun out of it sooner or later. You may suffer from ED, expectations dysfunction, for which there is no little blue pill. There is a lot of diver burnout.

Go and take the classes you want, dive when you can, enjoy it while you can. Father time is the great equalizer, and 30 years from now, no one will remember if your frog kick is perfect.

 

[macado]

Sometimes I regret it when I hear people talking about the cool capabilities that their CCR gives them. But I also enjoy the times when I am ready to relax with a beverage at the end of the day, and they’re still messing with their rig.

It's not really that bad. I'm usually drinking an adult beverage when building my rebreather.

In all seriousness, rebreather build + breakdown is more time consuming than open circuit but not horribly so. I would argue a lot of us can build/prep our rebreather for the next day in about ~15-25 minutes. Of course troubleshooting takes significantly more time than that if you run into an issue.

Back to the OP's question. While I do a fair bit more than 50 dives in a year I do believe that number is a good metric for keeping up with proficiently but honestly that number is quite ambiguous. For me it would depend on the parameters of those dives (depth, runtime, environment, deco obligations, gases used, etc).

When I first started diving CCR I pretty much dove my unit on every dive to build hours, proficiency and muscle memory. As a result my OC skills lapsed quite a bit. For the sake of argument let's call ~50 hours/50 dives your first season on a rebreather. I see a lot of rebreathers go for sale used online with less than that number. To me ~50 dives is basically MOD1 course (entry level rebreather course and maybe a couple weeks of CCR diving). My point here is don't take the 50 dive number too literally but if you are thinking of switching to CCR you should devote some significant hours/dives to developing good habits.

Nowadays I try to split my time equally between CCR and OC but I realize that can be difficult if you're only doing 50 dives a year.

For me a two hour dive in Ginnie (you mentioned CCR cave diving ambitions) does not require a rebreather. This is an arbitrary number but I tend to dive rebreather on dives over 2-2.5+ hours or deeper than 130ft for helium savings. I like diving OC so I have realistic idea of my SAC rate and how long it takes me to swim places on OC so I can use those numbers for CCR bailout planning.

I feel it's really important to have good OC skills (bottle handling with stages + deco gases) before one switches to CCR. It's been stated here on Scubaboard a million times but when your rebreather fails and you have to bailout you become an OC diver again. You better hope you're comfortable managing multiple bottles potentially thousands of feet back in a cave, doing multiple gas switches all while managing the air space of your failed rebreather (counterlung) along with your drysuit, wing, etc.

 

[NothingClever]

I am interested to hear from folks on here as to what their experiences have been as to how much one can accomplish as a tec diver if you are not a dive industry professional. Again, diver and instructor perspectives are both welcome.

I was in your shoes not long ago.

I think it’s important to have a comprehensive framework to guide my mental and physical skill development. I wanted a guide that provides me focus and the flexibility to chip away at matters over time and/or take big bites of intensive training depending on the available opportunities.

I couldn’t really find what I was looking for and I kept stumbling into the industry’s chronic drift towards becoming an instructor as the path to achievement. I just wanted (still want) to become a good diver so I wrote my own guide. I based my guide on what I was seeing on 4-5 dives a week, what I was reading in course books, observing and talking with instructors (both ones I respect and others who need improvement), and my own career experiences training individuals and teams to operate in dangerous environments.

The world already has enough SCUBA instructors but the world needs more proficient divers.

Stick to your guns to develop yourself.