Diver UK – July 2019

TECHNICAL DIVER

25 divEr

Top left: Another sub-100m

expedition, this time for the

Britannic1998 dive team,

showing off their AquaZepp

DPVs.

Top right: Tek93 flier.

Above: Jean-Pierre Imbert:

‘Safety is the key

consideration in diving.’

Below left: Divers Steve

Gatto and Tom Packer in

1990, with china crockery

and vases recovered from

the Andrea Doriawreck.

who had been bent while diving nitrox.

Famed Skin Divercolumnist ER Cross

even took a stand with a column entitled

Why I Won’t Use Nitrox.

Of course, at that point it was too late

to put the genie back in the bottle.

In January 1993, aquaCorpsheld the

first annual tech-diving conference,

tek.93, in Orlando, Florida, again just

before the DEMA show.

This brought together members of

the technical, recreational, military and

commercial diving communities for the

purposes of education and information-

sharing, as well as addressing the recent

spate of diving accidents, and what was

needed for the technical-diving

community to move forward.

As a result of the conference a group of

us including Billy Deans, Kevin Gurr and

others put together the first set of

community consensus standards or “best

practices” for technical diving.

We published this as Blueprint for

Survival 2.0that June in aquaCorps

#6 Computing. It was a set of 21

recommendations to improve technical-

diving safety in the areas of training,

gas-supply, gas-mix, decompression,

equipment and operations, based on

Sheck Exley’s original work on accident

analysis Basic Cave Diving: A Blueprint

for Survival.

In that book, Exley developed a set of

10 principles or recommendations based

on thorough analysis of cave-diving

accidents, and it had helped to reduce

cave-diving fatalities.

We also kicked off a new section in the

magazine, Incident Reports, which

featured detailed analyses of tech-diving

accidents and soon became one of the

best-read sections of the magazine.

One of my favourite quotes at the time

came from a scientific paper by

Jean-Pierre Imbert, who worked

on COMEX SA’s experimental

hydrogen-diving programme

and later became an IANTD tech

instructor, and others: “Safety is

the key consideration in diving.

It entirely controls depth and

time capabilities.”

Ironically the paper was

entitled Safe Deep Sea Diving to

1500 Feet Using Hydrogen. It’s

likely that few people at the

time would consider diving to

457m or using hydrogen breathing mixes

to be safe. But that was the lesson we were

learning. Safety was everything!

Over the next few years the various

tech training agencies, including the

Technical Diving International (TDI)

formed in 1994 by Bret Gilliam and Mitch

Skaggs, and later Global Underwater

Explorers (GUE), started in 1998 by

Jarrod Jablonski, developed solid training

courses and the safety record improved.

Technical diving began to establish

itself as a legitimate branch of sport

diving, and mix technology in the form

of nitrox was gradually adopted by the

recreational side of the diving business.

By 1995 PADI, along with the British

Sub-Aqua Club (BSAC), National

Academy of Scuba Educators (NASE) and

Scuba Schools of America (SSA), joined

other recreational and technical diving

training agencies to offer enriched air

nitrox training. The era of single-mix

technology – air-diving – was dead.

The establishment of tech diving and

nitrox use helped fuel the development of

what one might call a mixed-gas

infrastructure at the retail dive-store level.

This was a necessary step for the eventual

emergence of rebreather technology.

NEXT MONTH: Bring on the ‘breathers!

NOEL SLOAN / US DEEP CAVE-DIVING TEAM

STEVE GATTO

STEVE GATTO

LEIGH BISHOP

ALL IMAGES OTHER THAN

THOSE ATTRIBUTED FROM

THE AQUACORPS ARCHIVES

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