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A Message from Michael
Menduno
M2 on EuroTek.& OZTeK
Where
Few Have Gone Before |
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.
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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 will host Eurotek .If you
have occasion to breath gasses other than air (and you
better if you're diving beyond 60m or pushing no-D limits),
I recommend that you make the trek next year to OZ or
the UK in November, 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 them 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.
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