The Technical Diving Handbook

About This Book

The Ultimate Wreck-Diving Guide was the seminal book on technical diving: the primogenitor of its kind. It was written at a time when nitrox, accelerated decompression, helium mixes, rebreathers, and other emerging techniques and technologies were yet in their infancy. The publication of the original volume propelled deep diving into far deeper realms of the dark abyss.

The Ultimate, as it came to be called, was considered pure heresy by those who opposed progress. The purpose of the book was to introduce to the information-starved masses the small group of exploratory divers who were stretching the underwater envelope, and how they went about doing it. Call it an awareness guide.

Ignited by the author’s vision, technical diving has taken off like a launched rocket, accelerating faster with each passing moment and carrying with it a payload of unknown dividends. What began as a new phase in the slow progress of underwater exploration has grown with lightninglike speed.

Evolution became revolution. Almost overnight the concepts of “high tech” and “extended range” diving entered the forefront of human consciousness.

The rite of passage is over. Technical diving has come of age.

Underwater explorers can now share the benefits of space-age spin-off hardware and developing decompression methodologies. The Technical Diving Handbook is a practical guide for extended range divers: a soup to nuts volume that discusses in detail every facet of this exciting and challenging underwater activity. The current edition incorporates recent innovations that were unobtainable until only a few years ago, and in some cases were nonexistent when its predecessor first saw print.

Acquaint yourself now with such new and exciting devices as the programmable nitrox wrist decompression computer, the personal computer interface, the hoseless pressure gauge, the heads-up display, the full-face mask which permits regulator switching, decompression software for laptops, the submersible electric heating pad, and more.

Also included in this handbook are tips for blending nitrox, heliair, heliox, and trimix; instructions on how to build in-water oxygen decompression stations; the procedures and the chemicals needed to clean tanks, valves, and regulators for oxygen service; and a complete chapter on how to plan and execute expedition style mixed-gas diving operations.

The previous book was the ultimate. This one goes beyond.