The Joys of Helium(or the Depths of Despair) by Jason Beech

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Remember that time, perhaps many years ago, when your diving hobby was still new. Maybe you still had a fashionable haircut on the photograph on your open water c-card. Some of you still had hair and all your own teeth. Diving was easy, fun even. Then you started to take it more seriously. You took an advanced open water course, bought your own mask and fins, perhaps a wetsuit. You took your bemused partner / spouse / significant other, to whom you had extolled the virtues of your newfound sport, away with you on dive holidays to exotic locations. Your dive gears weighed almost nothing.

You started taking things more seriously still. You bought a BCD and a regulator and, after your partner realised that there wasn’t much to do in most dive resorts other than dive, you started going to more obscure locations with people you’d never met before. You would mention or enquire after the “vis” at least once in every conversation. You bought your first dive computer. A rescue diver course was inevitable – maybe even divemaster. Your dive gear now weighs 15kg and travels in its own special bag.

On one of your trips you caught your first glimpse of technical divers. Big hairy men and, in some cases, big hairy women, clad entirely in black rubber and carrying more tanks than the Soviet army. They giggled in the face of death and flicked the testicles of danger with the end of a wet towel. These were the boys and girls that did the “big” dives and you thought to yourself “I fancy a bit of that”. So you signed up for an entry level tech course and / or advanced nitrox and decompression procedures, where the instructor patiently and compassionately showed you that even though you were a divemaster or dive instructor, and despite your hundreds of dives, you still had a LOT to learn.

For example, you learn that none of the dive equipment you had amassed over the years was suitable for technical diving, not even your fins. You learn that tech diving equipment, despite being typically much simpler than a lot of recreational equipment, was much more expensive. You learn that you need a lot of equipment. Finally, you learn that owning equipment is a very different thing to being able to competently use it as your instructor takes perverse pleasure in showing you just how much farther you have to go in order to be a technical diver. Somehow, it all starts to come together and you manage to perform, if not master, the course requisites. Your dive gear is now a hefty 25kg, takes up all of your checked baggage allowance and your regulators travel in their own separate “special” bag.

If you have not been put off diving for life, or at least technical diving, you then sign up for extended range / basic trimix. You learn that in the period between this course and the last your instructor has "modified" the drills "for increased safety" and thought up a bunch of new ones. You learn that you need more equipment. You decide that your children don’t need a college education, dentistry or fresh vegetables as you convince yourself that $1,500 is a perfectly reasonable price to pay for a torch, possibly a bargain. Despite your stated objective of simplifying your dive equipment as much as possible your gear weighs in at a whopping 32kg, more than the average ten year old child, and requires three bags and you have to start taking your partner on trips again to help you carry it.

If you haven’t already decided by now that enough is enough, and that your life just won’t be the same without one more dive course, you sign up for advanced trimix. This is serious stuff and, as you may have guessed, requires still more equipment. As you may also have guessed, you will be indescribably pleased to learn that your instructor has again invented a further bunch of new skills, you are now expected to perform these to demonstration quality before participating in a video review and general character assassination. You will learn that helium is only slightly less expensive than buying a Lotus and, like owning a Lotus, requires a constant outlay of cash. Successful completion of this course places you in a very small minority of divers qualified to perform unusual and unsupervised hyperbaric experiments on their own bodies.

You’ve come a long way from that open water diver all those years ago. By now, your dive gear weighs more than 60kg, including between five and eight regulators, and regularly incurs excess baggage charges. When travelling, particularly through the States, you are ALWAYS subjected to a “random” security search due to the inability of minimum-wage airport security staff to distinguish the difference between a bag of regulators and a bag of Uzis. In an attempt to reduce your helium habit you shell out another huge tranche of your children’s college funds to buy a rebreather. Once qualified you get to entrust your life and the livelihood of your loved ones to a machine that casually attempts to kill you at least twice every time you get it wet. You also learn what fun it can be trying to take cylinders through airports as the security staff show that they are equally unable to spot the difference between these and a bag of Uzis. Your bathroom scales shatter when you attempt to weigh your equipment.

Through all this, that moment when the wreck appears beneath you, when your torchlight picks out the shape of the bridge or a gun, when you find the engine room or the galley, that sense of adventure, of going where few if any men have been before you, that makes everything worth it and more. Je ne regrette rien.

Posted: 13 June 2010, 3 comments.

3 comments

Single Tank Numpty on 13 Jun 2010 at 4:29

I absolutely love this.

RBW? TDS? etc

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