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Grant Graves
Tech Conference 2003, Miami

Posted By Grant Graves on 18 October 2003

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demaThe four founding technical diving agencies came together to produce a new Tek Show over the weekend preceding DEMA, October 4-5, 2003. Technical Divers International, TDI, International Association of Nitrox and Technical Divers, IANTD, Professional Scuba Association, PSA, and the American Nitrox Divers International, ANDI, all cooperated to put together the show.

For those new to technical diving, you will not remember when the original Tek Show began. In 1993, Michael Menduno (publisher of the now defunct Aqua Corps magazine) created the Tek Show. It was slated prior to DEMA each year. It ran for four years until Michael was unable to continue offering the show. This year saw the beginning of a new era for the Tek Show. Ten years after its humble beginnings, the show is back.

Much like the first Tek Show in 1993, this year’s Tek Show was small but solid. A dozen venders and over one hundred participants gathered to discuss and debate technical diving topics. Unlike 1993, this year’s show did not see the wild controversy and lively debates of its earlier cousin. Each day saw three open forum topics presented on different topics with additional smaller break out sessions each morning confined to decompression software theory and diving with sharks.

Deep Panel Day one had open forums on wreck diving, deep diving and gear. Day two had open forums on cave diving, rebreathers and blending. Panels were made up of various personalities from the tech diving community. Notables included; Tom Mount, Hall Watts, Dick Rutkowski, Joe Odom, Larry Green, Ed Betts, Kevin Gurr, John Bennett, Chris Parrot, Joel Silverstein, and Jeff Bozanic. What was truly remarkable was the lack of anything truly remarkable.

Ten years of talking about, debating, flaming and arguing about technical diving has brought about a strange commonality about the basic tenets of tech diving. There was very little disagreement about what the critical aspects of technical diving in all these different environments and with these different pieces of equipment are amongst the panelists.

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