I am starting to think about taking some tech training as a step towards my goals of wreck diving in the Great Lakes.
I'm wondering whether AN/DP (or the equivalent PADI courses) provide a certification and skills that are useful by themselves for real dives, or if they are better understood as stepping stones to trimix certification.
Much of the question revolves around whether or not there are dive teams, trips, and LOBs organized to work within the relatively narrow depth range where decompression is required but trimix is perhaps not.
I took my initial technical training and my trimix training years apart. Where I live you need to take a shovel with you if you want to dive deeper than about 50 meters so trimix training was not high on my agenda.
However, wreck diving WAS high on my agenda and when you're diving to wrecks at 30 or 40 meters and you've paid €125 for the boat ride to get there then you don't want to make two short dives on a day. I remember my first dive on a wreck after I finished certifying. I was the first person in the water and the last person out. Everyone else had done a bottom time of about 20 minutes. My bottom time was 50 minutes and the whole dive took 87 minutes. I remember it like it was yesterday. Just being able to do that dive justified the expense and effort I put in to reaching that point. As an aside I realized that I needed to find buddies who could do that too because at the time they weren't easy to find. This was not an easy process.
My initial training was also a stepping stone to some other activities, notably, ice diving without the limitation of being tied to a rope. IANTD ice diving sees the environment under the ice like a big cave, to put it in a nutshell.
That was my initial motivation. During and especially after my initial technical training I felt an ENORMOUS sense of relief because I no longer felt any time pressure from the NDL. I felt like I had somehow been freed of some kind of mental schakels and my diving became much more structured, much more under control and much LESS stressful, especially with respect to the aspect of time than it had ever been before that.
Aside from that I learned a number of new skills, a boat-load of "tips and tricks" and picked up on a mindset related to gear, safety and risk management that I benefit from in ways that sometimes don't even have to do with diving.
I don't want to make it sound too romantic but taking ... whatever it was called?... Advanced Nitrox and deco procedures or whatever it was called, transformed my diving and opened up all kinds of avenues for further development that had previously seemed unattainable.
These days, I pretty much do three things on a routine basis. I train novice divers, which involves a lot of shallow diving where the NDL doesn't even ping on the radar.... I do these pretty much on a weekly basis. For "fun" I make technical dives that are (mostly) our weekday evening splashes..... usually they're not that long (60-80 min) and involve swimming to points close to shore, including some interesting wrecks. These dives mostly require decompression within the 30 minute range, sometimes more but not that often... and I take 1 trip a year (most years) to somewhere tropical and dive my buttocks off for a week but remain within (or barely over) the NDL's.
I feel very lucky indeed to be in a position to do all three of those things. As for trimix. I'm glad I did it and I'm happy to make the odd deep dive but for local diving to a maximum depth of 50m I seldom use it. I have much more benefit from the technical nitrox training.
R..
