I really don't know what a "Tech Dive" is but like the judge said about pornography "I know it when I see it."
The term "Tech Diving" was coined by Mike Menduno back in the early 90's. He was trying to make the distinction between sport diving and what we are talking about in the same way that "Technical climbing" is split off from "Rock Climbing" or Technical Skiing" is split from recreational skiing. Basically, it is what ever you are doing that would not be considered to be "Recreational diving." I do know that it now means whatever the marketing guys want it to mean.
As for me, "Tech Diving" is just a set of tools that allow me to do something I want to do in the water. This generally means deeper or longer or under a overhead(real or deco), but may mean other things as well. We were wreck diving in the early 90's with helium mixes and doing oxygen assisted decompression. We were not "Tech Divers" we were "Wreck Divers."
As for Mike, here are some of his thoughts on where we are today.
A Message from Michael Menduno
M2 on EuroTek.08 & OZTeK'09
Where Few Have Gone Before
It was a little more than sixteen years ago, that I launched the first tek conference in Orlando, Florida with the help of handful of dedicated tekkies. Intended as an extension of "aquaCORPS: The Journal for Technical Diving," which I founded two years earlier, our goal was to bring together the fledgling "technical diving" community along with select commercial and military divers to share information and methodology, and discuss the pressing issues of the day. There were many.
At the time, nitrox-never mind trimix-was labeled a voodoo gas by "Skin Diver" magazine, and the D-word, deep diving, decompression diving or both, was considered taboo among recreational dive training agencies. For good reason: the fatality rate among so-called tech divers was skyrocketing and reliable tech training, operations and safety standards were all but non-existent.
That year, 1992, the tech diving community finally came out of the closet and, as a result of a contentious, yet enthusiastic tek conference, began to put the needed standards in place to assure its place in the broader diving community. Over the next four years, aquaCORPS hosted a Eurotek and Asiatek conference in addition to the US-based tek, and several new magazines devoted to tech diving also hit the newstands. The rest, as they say, was history and sport divers would never think about breathing "air" in quite the same way again.
