It was a little more than sixteen years ago, that I launched the first tek conference in Orlando, Florida with the help of handful of dedicated tekkies. Intended as an extension of "aquaCORPS: The Journal for Technical Diving," which I founded two years earlier, our goal was to bring together the fledgling "technical diving" community along with select commercial and military divers to share information and methodology, and discuss the pressing issues of the day. There were many.
At the time, nitrox-never mind trimix-was labeled a voodoo gas by "Skin Diver" magazine, and the D-word, deep diving, decompression diving or both, was considered taboo among recreational dive training agencies. For good reason: the fatality rate among so-called tech divers was skyrocketing and reliable tech training, operations and safety standards were all but non-existent.
That year, 1992, the tech diving community finally came out of the closet and, as a result of a contentious, yet enthusiastic tek conference, began to put the needed standards in place to assure its place in the broader diving community. Over the next four years, aquaCORPS hosted a Eurotek and Asiatek conference in addition to the US-based tek, and several new magazines devoted to tech diving also hit the newstands. The rest, as they say, was history and sport divers would never think about breathing "air" in quite the same way again.
Perhaps that's why I'm so pleased and amazed to see the aquaCORPS and tek legacy continuing under the leadership, some may say, craziness, of several stalwarts of the hyberbaric intelligentsia; veteran tekkie David Strike and his down under Oztek conference and deep shipwreck photographer Leigh Bishop and partner Carl Spencer who host Eurotek.
If you have occasion to breath gasses other than air (and you better if you're diving beyond 60 m or pushing no-D limits), I recommend that you make the trek next year to OZ or the UK, or both to attend these important conferences. Your life and pursuit of underwater happiness may depend on it. Go ahead. Mix it up! And tell him M2 sent you.
Writer Michael Menduno was the founder and editor-in-chief of aquaCORPS Journal and the tek conferences and coined the term technical diving. He currently resides in California.
