The Tec - Rec Split: Who Did It?

[Mod63]

There is a good article on Rubicon Technical Diving, and somewhere on the net must be Bill Hamiltons paper "Call It "High-Tech" Diving" from AquaCorps, printed in 1990. This defines technical diving in my opinion as used today.

 

[ianr33]

For a dive to be truly considered technical the following need to be true.

1)Your gear weighs more than you do.

2)Your gear cost more than a nice truck.

3)Dive planning and filling tanks takes longer than the dive itself.

 

[Jax]

There is a good article on Rubicon Technical Diving, and somewhere on the net must be Bill Hamiltons paper "Call It "High-Tech" Diving" from AquaCorps, printed in 1990. This defines technical diving in my opinion as used today.

The Rubicon article has a good definition.

Definition
I use technical diving to cover diving in excess of the usual range for recreational scuba divers, nodecompression, open circuit, air breathing scuba diving to 40 m. Technical diving may involve an extension of duration at any depth, the depth itself (in excess of 30-40 m), changing the gas mixtures to be used, or using different types of diving equipment. All these fall into the realm of technical diving.

 

[Mod63]

For a dive to be truly considered technical the following need to be true
1)Your gear weighs more than you do.
2)Your gear cost more than a nice truck.
3)Dive planning and filling tanks takes longer than the dive itself.

1) My BBOD comes in at 40kg - that's half my weight
2) A nice truck (or in my case a really nice car), costs more than 5 times what the BBOD has cost me
3) By the time my mono 12l diving friends are finished filling their tanks after a lazy day diving in a beautifull lake, I have orders my second Weißbier.

And if diving a rebreather is not considered technical diving...

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

1) My BBOD comes in at 40kg - that's half my weight
2) A nice truck (or in my case a really nice car), costs more than 5 times what the BBOD has cost me
3) By the time my mono 12l diving friends are finished filling their tanks after a lazy day diving in a beautifull lake, I have orders my second Weißbier.

And if diving a rebreather is not considered technical diving...

Can't say I know a lot about rebreathers, but at a recent workshop I attended there were a couple models that were being actively marketed as "recreational" rebreathers.

Seems to me it's just a piece of gear. If you're diving it in a lake, at recreational depths, not doing overhead, and not incurring any decompression obligation, then no ... I wouldn't consider it technical diving.

Why would you?

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[Lorenzoid]

Whereas the vast majority just use each diving grade as a natural progression in terms of depths and skills which is far more sensible.

If instead of just saying "deco diving is too dangerous"/"cave diving is too dangerous"/etc., the biggest dive education outfits, such as PADI, had just created a progression of "advanced" courses that were truly advanced (as opposed to AOW, which is not advanced diving at all) back when the diving community first started clamoring for this sort of education, there would not now be a split between the likes of PADI and the "technical" dive education outfits. Rather, PADI could have offered a progression of courses, in which the "Advanced" course started getting into deco theory. But it seems that the big dive education outfits instead chose to go in the opposite direction, dumbing down their courses to attract more people into entry-level diving and focusing on a progression of courses that brings new divemasters and instructors into the fold. The "technical diving" education outfits saw the need and moved in to fill the gap. If PADI had come out with deco/cave/whatever courses before these other outfits established a foothold some years ago, I suspect there would have been no motivation to coin a special umbrella term of "technical diving" for what's now taught in more advanced courses.

 

[fire_diver]

There was no "motivation" or anything to coin a term. The only reason the term "technical" has become part of our lexicon is because as more people spoke of it, the more people knew of it. Soon it was a common term.

The technical term only came about to delineate between "normal" recreational diving, and recreational diving that involved complex deco plans, contingency plans, and mixed gas. At that level, diving had become a technical process.

The societal split resulted from the fact in order to make "tech" dives safely, you had to be trained. There were very few trainers, and they wouldn't train you unless they knew you or were vouched for by someone they knew. It was a very tiny segment of the diving public. Many of the "rec" diving side felt that these "tech" divers were reckless and dangerous and publicly maligned them.

Then things normalized until JJ made his stroke comment and the assualt went the other way. Things are largely normalized once again.

 

[Mod63]

Seems to me it's just a piece of gear. If you're diving it in a lake, at recreational depths, not doing overhead, and not incurring any decompression obligation, then no ... I wouldn't consider it technical diving. Why would you?

IMHO, rebreather diving requires far more skills than recreational diving. It starts with the pre-dive preperations, the constant diligence during the dive and the fact that far more can go wrong on a rebreather dive. My initial training consisted of a small part on how to assemble and maintain the unit and hours under water with safety drills for all possible failures. Hyperkapnia, hypoxia and hyperoxia are constant threats, and manually flying the thing or bailing out is something that I think is beyond the realm of most recreational divers. I'm aware that some companies are marketing their units as recreational, and now that PADI is getting into the game it will become quite interesting. Maybe one day rebreather diving will move into the world of recreational diving, just as nitrox did, but with most of todays units, I would consider it technical diving at its finest.

 

[Blackwood]

If PADI had come out with deco/cave/whatever courses before these other outfits established a foothold some years ago, I suspect there would have been no motivation to coin a special umbrella term of "technical diving" for what's now taught in more advanced courses.

Didn't PADI have one of the first Cave programs?

 

[FireInMyBones]

I think the history portion of the question got lost somewhere along the line. I too would be interested in the dates of the split if there was ever diving that was not considered technical.

What did the actual progression look like?
Free diving... breathing from an animal's gut... (missing some information)... hard hat diving... SCUBA... some definitive split into the categories we know know.

Any thoughts? Most of us have some idea what the divisions are. The OP was mostly about when did they happen.