Education, Technical
This post about skill sets is for serious divers who are truly passionate about diving all that this world has to offer, every ocean, every lake, every river. If that’s not you, then read no further!
My endless curiosity has always made me wonder what’s just a little deeper, just around the corner, underneath the surface.
Over time, I’ve built up a set of skills that I think truly allow me to look at any body of water on earth and think seriously about diving it.
The first limitation in diving is one of time.
No decompression time limits and gas volumes limit most divers to about an hour on each recreational dive.
However, with technical diving, these limitations are made irrelevant with the appropriate logistics and skills.
In a technical diving course, you’ll learn how to manage different gas mixes, allowing for deeper dives and extensions of bottom time.
You would also learn how to calculate the decompression time and gas necessary to accomplish this.
Once you have the ability to dive with multiple tanks, then gas volumes also become irrelevant.
It just comes down to how many tanks you can carry or stage during your dive. It becomes a question of logistics.
Technical diving isn’t only about depth, but rather about decompression.
This can be calculated for a 2-hour dive at 25m, or a 1-hour dive at 75m.
Either way, doing a technical diving course allows you to go past recreational depths and time limits, whilst ensuring that you have the knowledge to plan enough bottom gas and deco gas to complete the dive.
Extended-duration dives tend to suck the warmth from you, even in 28C water.
Warm water diving is actually limited to only a few degrees of latitude north and south of the Equator, and only tens of meters below the surface.
Once past the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn, and you’re definitely in cold water country.
This leaves large areas of water that you’ll definitely need a drysuit to dive in.
Why limit yourself to Earth’s wonders that are only in warmer locales?
What about diving between continental plates in Iceland, or the wrecks of the North Sea?
With these two skillsets, I truly believe it enables divers to dive anywhere in the world you might want to.
Overcoming depth, time and temperature limits are not easy and will take some time to accomplish.
But just imagine knowing you can dive anywhere in the world. What a rush!
Leon Boey
Leon Boey has been a technical and cave diver for decades. He founded the Livingseas Diving Center and is co-founder of the Livingseas Foundation, which focuses mainly on reef restoration. The result is what is now the most significant coral restoration site in Bali. Having traveled and dived worldwide, being surrounded by the diversity of life in a coral reef is still his best feeling.
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