In the 80's and early 90's I was big into spearfishing, and was always looking for the "Lost Elephant's Graveyard"...the unknown and unspoiled place which had been safe and hidden from mankind for the last 10,000 years. My search for the BIG ecosystem, the huge fish, and the clouds of baitfish interfering with the 150 foot visibility, led me deeper and deeper. By the 90's I was deeper than 140 nearly every week...dive sites Like the Hole in the Wall and the areas in it's vicinity at 155, were intensely packed with life when compared to the recreational norms.
As my buddies and I began doing the deeper wrecks from 165 to 285, we quickly realized that this was time traveling, and the underwater world in these deep sites could be fantastic, though dangerous. The search led some of us like me to locate the sites of old fisherman's yarns, "the spike in the middle of no-where", in very deep water, that filled their boats with fish in the blink of an eye....most of these were pinacle formations, covered in deep water occulina corals...Sites unknown to divers in Florida. Other buddies like George Irvine, gravitated to the deep caves in some sort of "Journey to the Center of the Earth" kind of mission, where they would go where "No man had gone before", and see first hand the insides of aquifers and geologic structures only theorized about by hydro-geologists. Personally, I was more interested in the big fish and huge bio-mass of 10,000 years ago, so my caving interest was limited. Today I shoot video instead of a speargun, but the hunt is still much the same
Back to the issue of tech training.....
Tech diving is nothing like recreational diving. While the skills of recreational diving are critical to get you to tech diving, in an evolutionary sense, the population of people that can be good recreational divers is enormous, while the population of people that can be good and safe tech divers is tiny.
The vast majority of recreational divers could not possibly become good tech divers, just as they could not become good deep cave divers either. There is a certain "wiring" of the brain that is required for tech or deep cave.... whether this is a defect, or an asset, would be a topic of another discussion
The urge to panic has to be absent, and the first instant of emergency awareness must always be the immediate flood of possible optiimal solutions. In the general population of a country like America, MOST people have never existed in a world where they could be killed at any moment, with multiple outside events conspiring to KILL them.
The tech diver needs this, and the tech diver needs the advanced skills to use for the problem solving/solutions.
The problem with most tech training, is that it will ignore the former, and modularize the solution part.
This is why a system like GUE is so superior in my mind, because their program is so intensive, they will find those that can panic, and they will be flunked. They will also NOT compromise of the skills and solution portion, meaning once you have gone through this to the point of reaching a tech pass, you are likely to be a safe tech diver.
In other words, the OP is asking/thinking about, if he should get into tech diving.
I could ramble on for many pages about the cool things you can see between 150 feet and 300 feet. Recreational training agencies telling people there is nothing worthwhile to see below 100 feet is an utter lie, probably borne out of expediance and their lack of screening for people who will not be safe in this area.
For these reasons, I don't think we should tell "divers in general" that they should get into tech diving. Most should not. Those that have always found diving and solutions easy in challenging conditions, should perhaps consider themselves in a small population that can consider this. And it really should be easy....if it is not, I would say this is a big warning flag.
Those of us that do tech dives, are not "better" than the recreational, we are just missing some brain cells that most people have to help them avoid dangerous situations--there is good survival value in this. Since we do not "know any better", we can exist in places some people would say it is stupid for us to be in. It requires a special set of tools, but it also requires this mental wiring difference. Case in point, George and JJ, 3 miles back into a cave/aquifer 280 feet deep, with a 3 hour run back to the mouth of the cave after they began heading back, and a 16 hour deco from a 6 hour dive at 280.... So many opportunities for a dangeous place to kill you, and no way to remove yourself for a huge period of time, if something bad happens...You could say this is an exageration of tech diving, but the issues are largely the same.....real overhead or virtual overhead.
