What is Reddit's opinion of Scuba Confidential: An Insider's Guide to Becoming a Better Diver?

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I think after 50 dives or so I started to pick up gear. I definitely was a bit quick to choose a computer but you know, men and gadgets... it was hard to resist.

The biggest change came for me after an incident in which the mask I was using (an old one of my own) flooded. It's a mask with two lenses. One of the lenses just decided to pop out. After that I couldn't see anything and I was guiding my wife on a beach dive. Through some hand signals (my wife holding up fingers to represent certain data I wanted to know) and some calculations, I was able to surface us safely, including a stop.

I told my instructor about it and he said, 'You should try tech, we always carry two masks'. - 'What?'...

After hearing more about tech and its standardised configuration, it seemed a logical direction. Fun story: I was on a dive boat with an Australian guy that had dived every patch of water on the planet, and he was always bad-mouthing tech divers. He didn't know/realise I was a tech diver or my configuration was tech. He had this image of a tech diver as someone with masses amount of equipment dangling off of them. The opposite is true, in fact. It's recreational that is the guilt party there.

On on particular dive, (it was his last for that trip), he rolled off the boat into the water and came up cussing and screaming that his mask strap had broke. He was genuinely upset because this was a cool spot and it was his last dive that trip. I was already in the water and I called over to him that I had a spare. He was like, 'Really mate? Cool, right-o, can I borrow it?'. He starts swimming back to the boat and I say, 'Sure, here you go'. He's confused. He's like, 'What, you got another one with you... now... in the water?'.

He told me later he had changed his mind about tech divers! That was not the last time I 'saved' someones dive with a back-up mask. (People often forget to pack their masks before rushing out of the hotel room in the morning).

So, a lot of words to say one thing: there's a lot of ways to enjoy diving, and only through diving (a lot) will you know what you're interested in, or where things will take you.

You might see a wreck for the first time and you might even poke your head inside a port hole and you might be like, I want to go in there. I want to explore wrecks. Then you need some certificates to wave around so that a dive guide will take you in. You might hear from other divers that Nitrox is so much better than regular gas, especially on long dive trips, (Liveaboards etc) and want to try that gas. I did it and honestly, to prevent over tissue saturation of Nitrogen over repeated dives it can help, but on a 7 day/2x dives a day at average 20m, I found I'm fine with regular gas.

So yeah, as you said, if you come across dives that you want to do but are not licensed to, that would be a good time to think about levelling up. I think OW is locked at 18 meters but many dive sites around the world are a bit deeper. Dive shops will routinely take OW divers deeper than 18m, but not usually anywhere too close to 30m which your OWA can unlock, and for good reason. A lot of people immediately decide they want to go deeper, but you run out of air quicker, and usually, unless there is a wreck or it's a cavern or something, there isn't a whole lot to see below 30m, because of light, life. And remember even if you have Advanced on the boat, the others might not so you're not going deeper than everyone else. That said, every course not only unlocks what you can do, there is additional information that's useful.

Honestly, out of all the courses I've taken, I found Rescue to be the most full-filling. I loved that course. In terms of knowledge/technique ratio to cost, totally worth it.

Returning to the gear thing again, think of gear as attire for a long airplane ride. You want to be comfortable. When things are not as great as you would like them to be underwater and compounding the issue is something that annoys you like your weight belt moving around, or a leaky mask, that problem can become bigger than it really is. Most dive accidents are small problems that spiral. I make being comfortable a priority so I've chosen the gear and configuration that I think does that for me in the areas I dive, and by extension, is a safer way to dive. How I got to this configuration was just through diving and the responsibility I feel of wanting to make sure my wife is completely safe, especially if we dive in a place with guides we don't know.

One last thing. I recommend this book. It's a quick read but seriously, it should be included with every OW dive course in my opinion. There are things in there that they don't teach you but should, like how to breathe!