Posted by northcoast diver on February 14, 2005 at 09:38:17:
In Reply to: Re: dive report carmal calif / carmel pinnacles / sunday feb 13 2005 posted by Bob Aimes on February 14, 2005 at 07:13:11:
It is a group of tech trained divers, two of whom are tech instructors, who have their own boat, and who go out as a group and dive local pinnacles. Its really great to have rich friends who can afford to own this kind of materiel. All they usually as of you is to help defray the operating costs and to be a team player.
There are less than a half dozen Northern Calif dive stores that have tech programs. Up here, TDI happens to be the most numerous. Once the training is finished, you are certified to 330 ft, and you will likely have dived one dive to 250 ft. But unless you can fall in with a regular tech group, you wont do much tech diving after that.
A word about TDI: their published tech materials have not been updated in many years, especially the deco tables. So if you are with a TDI class you are much better off running your own deco tables off some popular software program, like V Planner or Abyss. Normally the instructors will let you do that, since they themselves are normally running their own software programs as well.
The whole idea of the tech group is to practice good buoyancy and trim, stay current in your skills, follow the safety protocols, and keep your actual experience current.
There is no major difference in procedures between a 300 ft dive and a 175 ft dive. More deco of course, and a little more deco gear, but otherwise still the same basic structure of a surface bubble check, maximum bottom time, maximum depth, deep stops, gas switches, and deco hangs. So for safety purposes, limiting the deco diving within the range of 150 to 180 ft makes the most sense for practice.
The only reason to plan a deeper dive would be to visit an actual wreck.
There is no major difference in what you see between a 50 ft dive and a 175 ft dive, the only major difference being the special safety procedures and the deco times of the deeper diving.
You can see a sampling of everything there is to see while diving 50 ft or shallower. This is the main argument against EANx use and TMX diving. But the training for EANx and TMX is much more thorough, and therefore more challenging, and it opens doors to underwater diving that otherwise would stay closed.
The point is to stay in practice. For my friends and me it was a great weekend of repetitive (3 hour surface interval) deco diving. And now the waters here on our coast are definitely crystal clear. Almost tropical! Perfect during the next 4 months, most likely.