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Technical Diving Myths vs. Reality
Greek cave instructor and filmmaker Stratis Kas explores some of the unstated myths about tech diving and offers up some hard-won consensus reality.
By Stratis Kas
Header photo in Sardinia by Mariona Yepes Daviu / Bluforia.
While many highly-trained divers have the knowledge and experience needed to face the very real challenges that technical diving offers, some do not. The idea that all technical divers have the advanced skills needed for their dives is a myth in the industry–one that needs to be acknowledged and addressed.
Let’s start at the beginning.
All technical divers know what they are doing about decompression
Technical divers are supposed to not only manage, but also to understand, and therefore agree with the diving plan that they are “choosing” to follow. They need to have a deep, extended, and in-the-field experience of all the factors affecting their chances of survival. That means really understanding decompression theory and how and why to use gradient factors. Relying on machinery means you’re not diving your plan and you’ve handed the responsibility for your safety to an expensive piece of equipment. It happens all too often.
One of our main concerns as divers is not even entirely factual. Deco theory is (still) a gathering of data that applies to a mysterious physiology and complex reacting unit, the human body. Today, technology and reliable equipment have enabled divers to extend their limits without all of the needed foundations. Massive dives beyond 100 m/328 ft, that until relatively recently were accessible to only the select few, are now “weekend” tech dives, often without surface support. I actually know people that do not dive shallower than 80m anymore because they cannot be bothered! Is this attitude followed by a parallel growth in knowledge and experience? Often not. And that is when we have a problem.
Many technical divers today would have a very bad day if they needed to do an ascent without a computer or even tables. Even though it is not a complicated thing to do, once you know what you are doing. Sometimes, the progress through certifications and into deeper diving is faster than the diver’s capacity to learn. We tend to forget that tools are there to only assist us, not do the job for us.. In the tech era we live in, we rely on electronics way too much. Computers don’t get bent, but divers may. The issue is not the fact that the computers aren’t doing what they are designed to do, it’s that divers can become dependent on them.
In my opinion, divers should progress slower, and most importantly take a different approach. During technical courses, divers are mostly taught gas management and gas switching skills. The fact that most agencies do not have their own (and that is a good thing) algorithms or deco procedure makes decompression a somewhat vaguer element in training. All the information about the effects of DCS is there; symptoms and dangers. But often the take away ends up being to “follow your software.” [Ed. Note that GUE teaches deco procedures that do not rely on dive computers]
I understand, given the uncertainty surrounding decompression, it can be difficult to define with certainty what to do, so courses tend to offer procedures that are “generally accepted as safe”. As a result, responsibility is transferred to the divers themselves. That’s why it’s imperative that divers become proficient in something that is so critical.
All technical divers are independent
Technical divers tend to be independent, it’s true. But some tend to follow, perhaps from habit, the advice of their recreational instructor who then becomes a permanent dive guide for them. That dependency isn’t in line with the level of knowledge and experience needed to do the dives they are certified for, so they depend upon the knowledge and experience from others and are not prepared to deviate from that.
Diving is an organic activity. It requires careful planning, granted, but not everything always goes as planned. Part of being a proficient technical diver is to be able to adapt and adjust to new situations and to adjust and respond without making mistakes. A diver who cannot do so, does not make for a good dive buddy. It would be a mistake to attempt serious dives with them.
One solution would be to treat advanced technical diving in incremental steps, applying the patience each step requires and anticipating the reward each step offers, which is considerable.
All technical divers are experienced
Technical divers, as well as recreational divers, often speed through their training, combining multiple courses without accumulating the necessary experience needed. The disadvantages to this approach are obvious, and not all of them have to do with safety. [Note: GUE requires divers to make 25 experience dives at the level of your course before taking the next level course.]
Let’s not forget we dive for fun. Why ignore all the shallow wrecks while racing to get your 100 m/328 ft certification quickly?? It’s true that many divers are less motivated, perhaps less excited, when they dive within their personal depth limits, in spite of the fact that each dive, with the right attitude, has its own unique thrill. If divers were more motivated to work their way slowly to depth and have fun doing it, they would be getting themselves more prepared for the next step.
Personally, every time I face a situation or a dive that feels new to me, due to the location, weather or other factors—not excluding dive buddies—I approach it with a combination of respect and excitement. Adding excitement to respect, helps me reduce fear. Removing respect from excitement increases risk.
Defining the ratio of these two elements is personal and paramount for each diver to truly grow. This process takes time to generate measurable awareness. It can’t be skipped or rushed. Divers should enjoy diving, monitor and celebrate each stage of growth, and challenge themselves in a gradual and measured way.
Only deep dives are worth it
Just don’t be that diver. Don’t be a depth snob. In more than two decades of diving, I am still amazed about the nonsense of the virtue of being deep for its own sake. Many compare it to driving fast. But it is not comparable, as speed is felt. The faster you drive, or fly, the more you feel the speed. Nowadays, diving deeper doesn’t really feel any different. Regulator technology (thankfully), and well designed rebreathers removed the perception of depth due to breathing resistance, and use of helium removes the narcosis. So a diver who is at 40 meters/130 ft will feel the same as a diver who is at 100 m/328 ft. Diving deep for a purpose—wrecks, recoveries, and teaching makes sense. Diving deep ‘just because’ doesn’t.
Let’s not endanger ourselves in order to have bragging rights. Deeper is not necessarily better. Enjoy shallow dives. Not just caves, but shallow reefs. There are some amazing shallow caves: Bel Torrente in Sardinia, Orda in Russia and one in Sinji in Greece. No deco, no trouble—just beauty. I’m not advising against deeper caves, just advocating not looking for them on purpose. For once the machismo is removed, shallow dives can be as rewarding, if not more so, than deep ones.
We can learn fundamentals as we go
All divers should take a “fundamentals” or foundations course. Actually all training agencies should include a (lighter) version directly during open water courses. First of all, there is no way to be independent as a diver without fundamental knowledge and skills. But as dive training is a business before anything else, at some point it went the other way and focused on minimum skills and time required to get a certification. As a result, some divers ended up learning their fundies as you go. Well, that may be ok (not really) during recreational diving, but it’s downright dangerous in the technical path.
It’s normal that advanced open water divers want to learn tech and cave diving. These days, with all the press and information available, the awareness about technical and cave diving has increased, seemingly making it more accessible to everyone.
As a result, too often divers with barely sufficient skills and experience want to enroll in demanding courses like the above mentioned. When asked to prove that they have the basic or fundamental skills needed to enroll, they explain that it’s the reason they want to do the course; to improve their fundamental skills. Following the lead of Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) and its Fundamentals course, over the last decade, most agencies have introduced a fundamentals type course. But still, many students expect to incorporate that training in an already time-constrained course like an intro to cave or a trimix course.
Divers who want to improve skills, should find a fundamentals course that will do that.
Scuba diving is a (competitive) sport
Among other things, the definition of a “sport” explains that there is a measurable performance that differentiates winner(s) from loser(s) that is, the one who runs faster wins. In scuba diving this is a very dangerous notion, as it pushes divers to compete against one another , often pushing their limits beyond their comfort zone. [Ed. Note that free diving does have a competitive component to it with an demonstrated safety record.]
Scuba diving is not a sport. It’s an activity. Much like hiking is about seeing wonderful new places, recording mental (or real) images and returning home with a new appreciation of nature, and alive. Actually, scuba diving is just that: underwater hiking. No need to add unnecessary risk by pushing limits that don’t offer any additional value to the actual dive.
Checklists are only for rebreathers
Once it was the fins. Another time it was the drysuit. Many times it was the mask, then the backup mask. On occasion it was the backup lights. Closed valve. Computer and bottom timer. Multiple times. Compass? Do I own one?
It’s very complicated to be certain that everything works perfectly during scuba diving. The extensive equipment, procedures, and unknown and uncontrollable parameters create room for constant alterations from the ideal plan.
The solution is using checklist(s). They are used constantly by professionals, in situations where the sheer amount of information, tools and procedures risk overwhelming the user, no matter how skilled. Using a checklist guarantees a constant, relaxed performance and reduces the chance that something will be skipped or forgotten. Checklists have become standard protocol for rebreather divers, but their benefits apply to open circuit divers as well.
Checklists save projects, fun dives, and lives. There should be one for what you need to leave home with: charge lights and scooters; check batteries on the backup lights, check BCD integrity. Anything that cannot be fixed or replaced easily on the day of the dive. A separate dive center checklist is a good idea–one that includes gas analysis. And finally, a pre-dive checklist.
Stratis Kas is a diving instructor & explorer, a film-maker, adventurer and storyteller. Stratis Kas deals with all of his subjects — extreme weather expeditions to days lost in wilderness — with unique sensitivity and fearless focus. He travels to remote, sometimes risky, and often freezing locations to create stunning films that change what we know about diving expeditions.
Since 2016, he has led the Top2bottom cave filming team that specialize in Adventure Filming. In 2017, he finished his first film “Amphitrite” that won a finalist place in the film festival, “Short to the Point” in 2018. Currently he is finishing his second feature film “Infinite Liquid” produced by Because I Can Ltd.
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Why It’s Okay To Make Mistakes
To err is human. To trimix is divine? Instructor evaluator Guy Shockey examines the importance of learning through one’s mistakes, and most important, being willing to admit and share them with others, especially for those in leadership positions. It’s the only way to create ‘psychological safety” within our community and improve our collective diving safety and performance. Wouldn’t that be divine?
By Guy Shockey. Images by Andrea Petersen
A few months back, I read an article about a club where members talked about failure and making mistakes. This club required that members freely discuss their mistakes and failures without fear of judgment. The goal was to destigmatize failure and recognize that we learn by making the very mistakes we are afraid to talk about! Moreover, to become truly high performing and develop unique and creative solutions to problems, the article argued that we needed to be free of the worry of failing—to understand that “to err is human.”
The article went on to mention that for high performing teams to be successful, they needed to operate in an environment of “psychological safety.” This term was originally coined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, and Gareth Lock has written about the concept extensively. In his work with The Human Diver, Lock identifies psychological safety as a key component primarily missing in our diving culture. As a full-time diving professional and someone who delivers The Human Diver programs, I couldn’t help but reflect on the failure-destigmatizing club in the context of our diving culture in general and, more specifically, dive training.
Consider the humble Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. The Roomba learns how to clean a room by bumping into nearly everything in the room and, with some nifty software, creates a “map” of all the “vacuumable” space in the room. Then, it goes about its business efficiently and repetitively cleaning the room. The Roomba has learned by making multiple mistakes—much like humans do.
Now imagine being able to transfer that new “map” from one Roomba to another so a new Roomba doesn’t have to repeat the mistakes of the first as it sets out to vacuum the room. Finally, imagine this transfer of data to be less-than-perfect—perhaps, occasionally, the new Roomba will make some mistakes (from which it will learn). But it will make far fewer mistakes than the original Roomba had to make.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. Humans learn the same way Roomba vacuums do (hopefully without running into as many hard surfaces), and we can transfer information between each other. Because the transfer process is less than perfect, we still make some of the same old mistakes. This is particularly interesting because, despite drawing specific and repeated attention to these common errors, students often still make the same errors! One of the most important parts of instructor training is educating future instructors to recognize where these common mistakes will occur and encouraging them to ramp up to being hyper-vigilant rather than regular-vigilant.
Learning Through Mistakes
One way we learn is by making mistakes, talking about them, and sharing the experience in the hopes that future divers don’t have to make the same ones. At its core, this is the very essence of learning. Incidentally, this is also what makes experience such an important characteristic of a good teacher. The more experience the educator has, the more mistakes they’ve made and, consequently, the more information they can transfer. Fear of owning our mistakes keeps us from learning from them; perhaps more importantly, it means that others will miss out on these important lessons.
Yet, in diving culture, we (for the most part) shy away from discussing the mistakes and errors we (hopefully) learned from for fear of being considered a less than capable diver. When divers in influential or leadership roles do this, it is a tremendous loss for the diving community in general—it robs future groups of divers of the opportunity to learn. Sadly, because this commonly happens at the leadership level, it is hardly surprising that other divers further down the line copy that behavior, and we ultimately end up with a diving culture that emulates the example of the leadership.
I advocate for taking the opposite approach. In my teaching, I am very open about the mistakes or errors I have made while diving. I recognize that I am basically a smart Roomba, and I learn by making mistakes. Thus, it would be disingenuous to pretend that I don’t make mistakes—I had to learn somewhere! I believe this approach lends authenticity to my instruction and starts to create psychological safety in my classes. Ultimately, my goal is to encourage students to recognize that, “If the instructor can admit they make mistakes, then it is okay to talk about the ones our team made during the training dive.”
I have found that there is a remarkable change in the relationship between student and instructor when this happens. Learning becomes more of a collegial activity, and stress and performance anxiety significantly decrease. This leads to more successful learning outcomes and happier students. I am a firm believer that, while training can be serious, it should also be fun!
Creating Psychological Safety
Creating psychological safety in our diving culture is a daunting task, but every flood begins with a single raindrop. The first thing that needs to happen—at all levels—is an acknowledgement of failures and mistakes among those in positions of influence and leadership. Sadly, this is not as easy as it sounds, and there is frequent pushback. Ego is one of the most dangerous aspects of a personality and it frequently causes people to overreach, crippling growth and learning. The irony here is that every single one of us has made a mistake. We all understand that no one is perfect, yet many in leadership positions cling to the view that vulnerability is weakness—that demonstrating imperfection will cause others to stop trusting them (or revering them).
I propose that the opposite is true. I should also note that I believe every dive professional is acting in a leadership role. This means that, while creating psychological safety can best be started by those in senior leadership roles, it must also be encouraged at all levels of leadership, including anyone in supervisory or teaching roles. In a perfect world, every diver would embrace this approach and enable psychological safety within their team.
There are a few things you can do to help develop psychological safety. First, facilitate a debrief at the end of the dive and begin with “something that I as the leader did wrong or could have done better was…” This immediately creates fertile soil for psychological safety to flourish. When the leader is the first person to say, “I made a mistake,” it establishes that this is a safe place to discuss mistakes and errors with the intention of learning from them. This opens the door to follow-up discussions.
On the subject of transparency, in any organization it is often the voice of dissent—a contrary position—that is the most valuable. This voice causes the group to reflect on original assumptions and decisions and offer a perspective that “groupthink” does not. This means that we need to be open to different solutions to problems lest we be blinded by our own cognitive biases—ones that have been developed over thousands of years of evolution in order to make us more efficient Roombas.
We are essentially fighting against our own brains, and it takes a significant amount of effort to think outside the box. We are hard-wired to think in terms of “evolutionary” rather than “revolutionary” ideas, and we need to make a conscious effort to consider the voice of dissent and understand why it is so hard to do so.
In Conclusion
In psychologically safe environments, we experience a significant increase in “discretionary effort,” or shifts on the “need to do” and the “want to do” curves. If a team has a high degree of psychological safety, they are motivated to perform higher than the minimum standard. If you create a high degree of psychological safety, your team will perform better as a result.
This is where it all comes full circle. We want our dive teams to perform at a high level. We want them to have a high degree of discretionary effort. We want them to embrace our “commitment to excellence.” Therefore, we must be the ones to create the psychological safety necessary to facilitate this growth.
One of the most effective things you can do as a leader is to be open and willing to share that, in the end, you are human too. You make mistakes, you admit to them, you learn from them, and you share them with others so they can learn too.
One of the most effective things you can do as a leader is to be open and willing to share that, in the end, you are human too. You make mistakes, you admit to them, you learn from them, and you share them with others so they can learn too.
DIVE DEEPER
Other stories by Guy Shockey:
InDEPTH: Reflections on Twenty Years of Excellence: Holding The Line (2019)
InDEPTH: Situational Awareness and Decision Making in Diving (2020)
InDEPTH: The Flexibility of Standard Operating Procedures (2021)
InDEPTH: How to Become an Explorer: Passion, Partnership, and Exploration (2022)
InDEPTH: Errors In Diving Can Be Useful For Learning— ‘Human Error’ Is Not! by Gareth Lock
InDEPTH: Learning from Others’ Mistakes: The Power of Context-Rich “Second” Stories by Gareth Lock
Guy Shockey is a GUE instructor and instructor trainer who is actively involved in mentoring the next generation of GUE divers. He started diving in 1982 in a cold mountain lake in Alberta, Canada. Since then, he has logged somewhere close to 8,000 dives in most of the world’s oceans. He is a passionate technical diver with a particular interest in deeper ocean wreck diving. He is a former military officer and professional hunter with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science. He is also an entrepreneur with several successful startup companies to his credit.
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