Tech Tidbits
Article 01
by Arnie Warshawsky
(This is a reprint of a previous series, which will be released on a regular basis. Enjoy!)
How It All Began…
I admit it. I like to dive deep just for the vicarious thrill of it. Really, though, that should not be your reason. Much better motivation is if there is a wreck that you want to see or a cave you want to explore. The purpose of this periodic (I hope) column is to share some of my thinking about and experiences in the world of technical diving. But before I launch into this topic, let me briefly tell you how it all began.
My wife and I lived in Monterey during 1971-73; I was going to graduate school at the US Naval Postgraduate School. Whenever we drove through Monterey and Pacific Grove we would see all these people (mostly guys) changing into or out of heavy neoprene along the side of the road. I was intrigued, but when I inquired about learning how to dive I was, incorrectly, told that since I have a hearing loss I would not be accepted for diver training. I chalked that up to a simple case of you can’t always get what you want.
Fast forward 22 years. We were visiting Hawai’i for one of my wife’s projects. I planned to go snorkeling. Her colleague suggested I take an Intro to Diving experience instead of just snorkeling. I told him what I had been told years earlier. He told me that I had been misinformed and helped me arrange an intro course, which is now known as Discover Scuba Diving. So I went on several dives and loved everything about them. My instructor suggested that after I went home I should find a local dive shop and get certified. I completed my Open Water Diver training in March 1996, just a month shy of my 50th birthday. I was hooked. In rapid succession—maybe too rapid—I took the Advanced Open Water and Rescue Diver classes. Down inside I wanted more. My smarter half, who generally thinks diving is crazy, supported my budding diving addiction but insisted that I do so safely—she didn’t want to become a widow. Her attitude propelled me to seek out more scuba training. I became a scuba class junkie.
So that is why, in 1997, John Woodworth, a dive buddy of mine and a member of Aqua Tutus, introduced me to Dennis Hocker, who reportedly taught some of the more advanced diving classes. After talking with Dennis a bit, he, not willing to take on an unknown quantity as a student, invited me to go on a dive with him at the Breakwater. After passing muster with Dennis, he agreed to take me on as a student. I took IANTD Enriched Air Diver and Deep Diver training with him. While these are not technical diving classes, they do set the stage for more advanced training, plus your instructor gets to evaluate your water skills to decide if you make a good candidate for technical diving beforehand. Technical diving is not for everyone!
I also joined Aqua Tutus. Wow! Lots of people who liked to go diving and sharing all kinds of stuff about diving. Plus monthly pizza and beer. If I was hooked before, now I was reeled in.
I should point out that taking training with Dennis is very different from taking training at a dive shop. It isn’t a business to him. He truly wants to help divers find the skill level with which they are comfortable. When you finish one class with Dennis and ask him to teach the next class in the sequence he gently refuses, suggesting instead that you simply go diving to internalize the newly-learned skills. It was an example I would never forget.
By this time, I was imagining how cool it would be to dive on shipwrecks in general, and particularly on an aircraft carrier, an idea that became a bucket-list entry in my mind. Then, the only aircraft carrier at a reasonable diving depth was the USS Saratoga.[1] In 1946, after service in World War II, the Sara was assigned to the Operations Crossroads nuclear test series. She survived the first nuclear test but sunk a month later after the second test (an underwater explosion code-named Baker). Her history presented a coincidental tie-in with my then job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Sara sits upright at 175 feet to the sand. Way beyond recreational limits.
USS Saratoga (CV-3) enroute in 1945. US Navy photo.
Recall that I mentioned earlier my wife’s insistence on me doing things safely. This meant I would need to be trained to dive deeper than recreational dive limits if I were to check off that bucket-list entry. By then I knew that Dennis taught technical diviing. Well, one thing led to another and I eventually found myself in Dennis’ living room as half of an intimate dive training class—Mark Johnson and I—beginning the technical diver training sequence.
So what does ‘technical diving’ mean? Technical diving is an offshoot of normal recreational diving where the recreational limits of maximum dive depth and dive time are eliminated, freeing you dive as deep as like and as long as you like consistent with your training, equipment, and experience. But, as they say, there is no free lunch. To safely discard the recreational constraints, you have to do significant dive planning plus have the discipline to follow the plan. Shooting from the hip is not allowed. You also give up the ability to safely ascend to the surface at any point in the dive, which is a defining aspect of recreational diving. One important implication of this latter point is that you have to minimize the chance for equipment failures forcing you to the surface.
So the aspiring technical diver has to learn how to plan dives carefully, a topic that is only superficially covered during recreational diver training, and be sufficiently mature to follow rigorously the dive plan. Good technical divers approach their dives with the respect that the dives deserve. In addition, since the ocean is a harsh, demanding, and unforgiving mistress, the wise technical diver invests in enough redundant equipment to eliminate as many single points of failure as possible.
Wow! Sounds hard. Actually it is not as hard as it sounds. With a good attitude and a good instructor, if you want to learn how to go technical diving you can. In the next column, I plan to address technical diving equipment.