Safety Culture - diving in the zone
“Thank [beep] for that! How lucky were we? We better not do that again.
Don’t tell anyone though, we don’t want to look like amateurs...”
Technical Diving & Training
Two buddies are holding the line. The second is holding the arm of the one leading the way, communicating with him by means of touch. With visibility nil, the first buddy protects his head and face with his hand in case of contact with a wall or rock.
A rusty tram clatters past us. An uninterrupted line of cars slowly moves along Leó Frankel Street. Businessmen in dark suits hurry to their desks. Women in high heels walk carefully on the cobbled pavement. Between the houses, the ferries on the Danube can be seen, drifting past the Isle of Margaret that divides the town. We are in the middle of the Budapest morning rush hour. Our team attracts attention from passersby.
A research study is being conducted into the personality traits and behaviour of male cave divers and research subjects are required.
Please pass this information on to relevant friends, peers and colleagues.
Becoming a good technical diver means starting with the solid basics. There is no magic! But let’s take a look at several things in general...
Many of the pieces of equipment used by technical divers look different to the equipment used by recreational divers. However, for most of the time, the basic principles are the same.
Freediving is easy. All you have to do, according to freediver extraordinaire, Stig Åvall Severinsen, is “learn to hold your breath as long as you can”. Simple.
I first spoke with Sheck Exley in the summer of 1991. I had begun publishing aquaCORPS: The Journal for Technical Diving, a year earlier and I was working out of the office at Capt. Billy Dean’s dive shop in Key West, Florida, the first technical diving training center in the United States. “Technical diving”, a term we had just coined to describe this new style of diving, was just in its infancy.
Experience of life suggests that anything which is fun tends to be either illegal, immoral, fattening or dangerous. Recreational diving partly conforms to this universal law, ranking below hang gliding and parachuting but above most sports in regards to the risk of a fatal accident.
How can rebreather diving be made safer? That was the question at the core of the numerous presentations and discussions at Rebreather Forum 3 (RF3) held in Orlando, Florida, this May.
The forum recommends that rebreather manufacturers produce carefully designed checklists, which may be written and / or electronic, for use in the pre-dive preparation (unit assembly and immediate pre-dive) and post-dive management of their rebreathers. – Written checklists should be provided in a weatherproof or waterproof form. – The current version of these checklists annotated with the most recent revision date should be published on the manufacturer’s website