What event made you head toward/away from DIR?

[schultz]

Thanks for the chill-pill Paul. It's good to know I can rely on you to give me

First allow me to apologize to you and everyone here. My intent on the last post was not to offend, belittle, defame, or flame you or the others, I was merely using your own words from a previous post to illustrate the example that everyone tends to make and that is that DIR equals Technical Diving. This, in my opinion, is what scares new divers away from some valuable techniques and concepts.

Now, some may subscribe to all the GI3'isms out there that by saying diving is diving, but there are other definitions for technical diving. "By one definition the minimal requirement of a technical dive, the characteristic that sets it off from other kinds of scuba-based  diving, is that on a technical dive the diver uses more than one breathing mixture.  Just diving beyond the limits defined for recreational diving is not enough to qualify as technical diving, especially if air is the only breathing gas.  However, deep air diving using other gas mixtures and oxygen for decompression, for example, would be regarded as technical diving.  Also, a dive with rebreather apparatus might be regarded as a technical dive."[sup]1[/sup]

Almost everyone in this particular thread has done some level of technical diving. That being said, most of us have adopted some level of Hogarthian method in our diving. The problem is we utilized it at the technical level of diving, using multiple stages, deco profiles, and re-breathers. But because we use these techniques on a regular basis, people outside the technical realm assume that what we are doing, with all our equipment strapped to out backs and sides is DIR.

My main argument is that almost all of us often equate these terms as one in the same. This is an error on all our parts, and in my opinion, it's discussions like this, heated as they may be, that tend to steer people attempting to learn safer ways of diving. If we want promote some if not all aspects of DIR, then removing technical babble from threads such as this may help better educate those out there that do not necessary know or want to know about technical diving.

Had I learned about DIR in a different contexts (e.g. outside technical dive forums), perhaps I would have adopted aspects of the philosophy sooner.


[sup]1[/sup] , R.W. Bill Hamilton, Ph.D., and Joel D. Silverstein