BLD Foundations
Beginner Technical Diving | Intro to Tech courses | Discovering Tec
If you are an Open Water Diver with over 50 dives with Nitrox and deep or an Advanced Open Water diver and you feel like there is more out there?
Most people think Technical Diving is dangerous, but to be honest, and we also teach recreational levels, tech diving seems more safe. Why?
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- You will always have double the amount of breathing gas,
- You will always carry a redundancy of equipment like a 2nd mask, cutting device, computer and regulators
- You will learn how to safely ascent with the correct equipment (SMB and Spool) from 18 meters and up
- You will learn more about the diving Physics and Physiology
- You will learn more rescue skills
- You will learn more skills than in any recreational diving level
- You will also learn what it means when your Dive Computer goes into Decompression mode and how to ascent safely doing deco stops and how to actually handle deco stops by calculations and not only depending on your dive computer.
The 1st 2 levels of tech courses
There are different configurations (equipment setups) You can Sidemount dive, where you wear the scuba cylinders on your side from 1-5 tanks, or you can dive on a twinset, meaning 2 tanks together with a manifold on your back.
You could do an Intro to tech with TDI with us or any other technical diving centre. This is good for people who are already on their diving holiday or are not sure what they think about twinsets or sidemount gear. The intro to tech is not mandatory to go into the first level of Tech Diving but you do require to be either a intro to tec or sidemount diver when doing the cave diving courses.
Sidemount diving
What we also regard as “Soft” or “starter level” Technical Diving is Sidemount Diving as mentioned above. Some Recreational Diving Agencies even allow Open Water students now to dive on Sidemount on a single tank.
Sidemount means exactly what it says. You carry the tank on your side instead of on your back. This is a fantastic way of diving if you don’t like to fall over on the dive deck, if you have a bad back or if you a a small person, as you can hold the tank in your hands and have the boat crew hand it over to you, while being in the water.
Doing a Sidemount course with Blue Label, means 2 tanks. One left and one right. The transition to Tech is than even easier and almost a must! Why have 2 tanks with 2200 liters of air and not use it? But to know how to so that safely you go to the 1st level of “Tech” Diving.
For all technical diving courses at Blue Label Diving we use a twinset as a standard.
A Twinset is a combination of 2x S80 (11.2 ltr) cylinders connected via a MANIFOLD and steel CAMBANDS. If you are used to diving with a tank on your back, the only thing you have to get used to is the extra weight of the 2nd tank.
You can combine most Beginner Tech Diving courses, and if you plan a holiday to Thailand and you want to focus on diving you might as well do them all together. For example if you want to do Sidemount , Advanced Nitrox and Decompression Procedures it will take you 6 days total. If you do the levels with PADI you have to add 1 extra day, thus 7 days total.
Also for Wreck Diving (advanced), which we call Overhead Environments, you only need to be a AOW diver with more than 50 dives. Cavern is OW diver with 25 dives 🙂 On the side menu of this page you can find all the courses of which we regard them as “Starter Level Tech”, even the PADI Open Water level Rebreather course.