TECHNICAL DIVER
23 divErO
NE OF THE PROBLEMSin the
initial days of tech diving was
that almost all of the diving was
“in the closet.” It wasn’t widely talked
about or written about in the diving
press, or discussed at dive-industry
forums such as the Diving Equipment
and Marketing Association (DEMA)
show.
It was understood that if you were
doing this kind of diving you kept it to
yourself, lest you be blamed, shamed or,
worse, get someone hurt.
There was no forum to exchange
information and ideas, and there were no
training courses. Unfortunately the lack
of information made divers less safe!
I started aquaCorps Journalin January
1990 to change that. Our initial tag line
was “The Independent Journal for
Experienced Divers”.
I had begun doing relatively deep (45-
60m) decompression dives in California
in the late 1980s with a citizen-science
group out of Silicon Valley called the
Cordell Expedition. It conducted
biological survey studies on the sea-
mounts off the Big Sur coast.
I was so excited about the dives and
what we were doing that I wanted to write
about it, and approached a number of
dive magazines. No one would touch it.
Eventually a California-based
magazine called Discover Divingagreed
to publish my article, but not without
caveats and warnings on every page that
this was notrecreational diving.
I was also introduced to cave-diving,
and got a copy of Bill Stone’s 1987 book
The Wakulla Springs Project, which
absolutely blew my mind: “You can do
that?”
In that first issue of aquaCORPSwe
featured an article by Dr Bill Hamilton
headed Call It “High-Tech” Diving.
We also referred to it as “advanced” and
“professional sports” diving, a moniker
invented by marine biologist and early
rebreather pioneer Dr Walter Stark,
inventor of the first production electronic
closed-circuit rebreather, the Electrolung.
At the time, we didn’t really know
what to call this new form of sport-diving
that cut across traditional sport-diving
communities. None of the names seemed
to work.
It was also clear that we needed to
establish this form of diving as separate
and distinct from recreational diving.
The recreational diving industry was
not happy that deep and decompression
diving – the “D-words” – were out of the
closet, and didn’t want to have anything
to do with what was emerging.
People were rightly concerned that an
increase in diving fatalities would trigger
US government intervention and remove
the recreational diving industry’sclimbs, for example a 5.11 climb, using
the Yosemite Decimal System (YDS)
developed by the Sierra Club.
So I pinched the term for diving. I used
“technical diving” for the first time in
aquaCorps#3 Deep,published in January- In the following issue I changed
aquaCorps’ tagline to “The Journal for
Technical Diving.”
We also launched a companion
newsletter calledtechnicalDiver.
Later that year Drew Richardson,
then a vice-president of the Professional
Association of Diving Instructors (PADI),
penned an editorial: Technical Diving –
Does PADI Have Its Head In The Sand?”
for PADI’s Undersea Journal.
This helped to legitimise tech diving,
as distinct from recreational diving. And
the name stuck! Contrary to popular
belief, PADI was not out to shut down
tech diving, but it did want to distinguish
it from recreational diving.
W
E CALLED IT THE“technical diving
revolution” but the revolution was
really about adapting mixed-gas
technology to the consumer market.
The concept was simple and brilliant:
you could improve divers’ safety and
performance, enabling them to extend
their depth and bottom-time, by
optimising their breathing gas for the
planned exposure.
In this case optimising meant:
1) Maintaining efficient and reliable
oxygen levels over the course of a dive;
2) Reducing/eliminating undesirable inert
gas effects such as narcosis and HPNS
(High-Pressure Neurological
Syndrome) and facilitating off-gassing;
3) Reducing breathing-gas density to
minimise the work of breathing and
prevent CO 2 build-up.
As such, mixed-gas diving also.VECTEEZY.COM
exemption from Occupational Safety &
Health Administration (OSHA)
standards. UK divers had similar worries
about increased Health & Safety
Executive (HSE) regulation.
At that time, I had several friends who
were rock-climbers and involved in what
was then called “technical climbing”, in
which individuals used ropes and
protection to tackle rock-faces that could
not otherwise be climbed.
The word “technical” had all the right
connotations. I even imagined that
“technical dives” might one day be rated
by degrees of difficulty and/or exposure,
in the way that climbers graded rock☛
Opposite page: A technical
team dives the 108m-deep
King Edward VII wreck near
Scapa Flow in 1997.Top: Wakulla Springs cave-
diving in 1987.Above: Dr Bill Hamilton’s
article in the first edition
of aquaCorps.Below:Drew Richardson
wrote this article in the
Undersea Journal 28 years
ago. Today he is President
and CEO of PADI.US DEEP CAVE-DIVING TEAMdivErNEt.com