23/02/2026
Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed a lot of thoughtful discussion around the term “technical diving” - what it means, where it came from, and whether it still actually tells us anything useful.
I want to be clear upfront: I’m not the most experienced technical diver out there, and Traveler Submerged isn’t a technical diving brand. I’m still very much a student in that space. But I do spend a lot of time listening, training, and diving alongside people who’ve been doing this far longer than I have.
What’s struck me is how slippery the word technical has become.
Depending on who you ask, it can mean planned decompression, mixed gas, overhead environments, certain equipment configurations, or simply a level of commitment where you can’t just swim to the surface. And yet none of those lines are universally agreed on. The same dive can be described very differently depending on which agency someone trained with, or even which decade they started diving in.
Historically, many of the things we now label as “technical” were simply… diving. Twinsets, staged decompression, deep wrecks, long runtimes, complex logistics - all of that existed long before the term became common language. The label came later, and it seems to have grown broader ever since.
Today, technical often feels less like a precise description of a dive and more like a convenient umbrella. Sometimes it’s useful shorthand. Other times it feels like a marketing category that bundles together training pathways, equipment choices, and perceived risk, even when the actual demands of the dive don’t change.
What I find interesting is that the most experienced divers I’ve spent time with rarely lean on the label at all. They talk about planning, control, redundancy, margins, and decision-making. About commitment rather than depth. About consequence rather than configuration.
So I’m genuinely curious:
Does the term technical diving still help us understand what’s happening underwater?
Or has it become so broad that it says more about context and branding than about the dive itself?
Not trying to redefine anything here - just sharing an observation and enjoying the conversation.
I’ll also say this: a lot of my thinking around this has been shaped by training and conversations with people who teach and dive far beyond my current level. Huge credit to Chris Heitkemper (Platinum PADI CD and Tec IT) of IDC & Tec Diving Malta working with Starfish Diving Malta for the quality of his technical instruction and for opening my mind not just to deeper dives, but to entirely new pathways in how I think about planning, control, and commitment underwater.
Not a call to “go tech” - just a reminder that good training has a way of expanding how you see the whole picture.