Quote:
Originally Posted by dirtydon
li would like to read up on tech diving before starting the class.should i buy the crew pac and study first or is there some other books or info someone could suggest?
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If by "crew pac", you mean the PADI training materials, no... I wouldn't recommend that. PADI is essentially a recreational diver training organization, and I would steer you toward a training agency that specializes in mixed gas and overhead environment diving, like TDI, IANTD, or GUE, to name a few popular choices. If I were to recommend a good comprehensive reference work, it might be "
IANTD's Encyclopedia of Technical Diving", but I'm biased as that's the one I'm most familiar with. Jarrod Jablonski's
"Doing it Right: The Fundamentals of Better Diving" is also well worth reading, and has a lot of valuable information about gear, techniques, and procedures that are good to be at least familiar with if you're interested in more advanced dives. (Don't get Jablonski's book from Amazon for $80... GUE has it for $19.)
If you want something a bit easier to digest, there's a really good primer on technical diving for recreational divers in the latest issue of DAN's Alert Diver magazine. It's available online
here.
As another online resource, you might be interested in looking at the
"Transitioning to Technical Diving" forum at thedecostop.com.