Recreational diving, like all things that people do for adventure, sport or fun, is evolving fast, and right now one of the biggest influences on mainstream diving comes from the more extreme and of the sport known as tech-diving.

SCUBA (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) diving is a fun way to gain access to places and experiences that many people will never be fortunate enough to see. But its a relatively serious kind of fun–you must be well trained–and as a result, diving has, over the years developed a well-thought-out series of best practices that, if observed, will allow you to explore the underwater world with a high degree of safety. Like many other outdoor activities, rock-climbing or skiing, for instance, millions of people get to enjoy being outside and if they follow the correct procedures keep risk to an acceptable minimum.

This set of evolved best practices has served the diving community well and has been improved and built-upon by the industry’s certifying bodies: PADI, CMASS, BSAC, and others, allowing novice divers to become more proficient and engage in steadily more ambitious diving adventures as their experience grows.

This system continues to work well for the vast majority of recreational divers but around nineteen years ago, for some at the extreme margins of the sport, it was time for a rethink.

Any dive that involves finning into areas where direct access to the surface is obstructed in some way–known as an overhead environment–is immediately more hazardous to divers. Diving beneath rock overhangs, through gaps in rocks, require caution. Penetrating shipwrecks can increase the risk to a point where specialized expertise, procedures, and equipment may be required.

Cave diving, where divers enter flooded cave systems from within which exiting to the surface requires multiple transitions through potentially difficult and constricted cave sections, is the ultimate expression of this kind of exploration.

You can recognize a DIR diver when you see one on a dive-boat by the configuration of their set-up. if you are a diver the differences stand out very clearly. In fact, it’s important to know when you go diving with a DIR diver because their emergency procedures may differ from what you have been taught.

Deep diving is another area that increases risk and technical challenge. Divers may be required to breathe specialized gas mixtures within certain depth parameters and long waiting periods at specific depths during ascent (decompression stops,) may be required to allow nitrogen absorbed by body tissues under pressure to re-enter the bloodstream without causing bubbles (a condition known as decompression sickness or the bends.)

The mode of diving required for these kinds of adventures has over the years become known as tech diving owing to the increased equipment, planning and number of technical considerations implied.

Combine diving deep and diving into caves and you have one of the most extreme areas of the sport, and it was divers focused on these kinds of dives in the mid nineteen nineties, particularly as part of the Woodville Karst Plain Project–a research effort to map the massive underwater cave system that runs from Tallahassee Florida in the US to the Gulf of Mexico–who began to not only radically rethink diver safety procedures and gear set-up but also codify their conclusions into a system that any tech diver could adopt. This system became known as “doing it right,” or DIR, and it covers dive preparation, teamwork, diving style, what equipment you take, and how it is configured. Proponents follow the system religiously and with precision, largely because they see that the system’s edicts make rational good sense for what is required when diving in extreme conditions and making it second nature increases the likelihood that all the divers on an expedition will make it out safely.

You can recognize a DIR diver when you see one on a dive-boat by the configuration of their set-up,) if you are a diver the differences stand out very clearly. In fact, it’s important to know when you go diving with a DIR diver because their emergency procedures may differ from what you have been taught.

Doing It Right

In the intervening time between the beginning of DIR and now, the DIR system has been adopted by tech divers around the world, and, because of this, and because divers travel to dive, and the fact that DIR divers continue using the DIR system even when they’re doing dives that most divers would consider non-technical, increasing numbers of less experienced or less extreme divers have become aware of the DIR way, and some have come to recognize that much of what the system contains is a good idea for even basic recreational diving.

All of this will be relevant to anyone reading this who is already a diver, is planning to go diving, or dreams of going diving some day.

It’s relevant to anyone diving with Yago Rodriguez because Yago is a DIR diver, and while “doing it right” in the specific sense is at the core of his philosophy as a diver, it is part of who he is in the more day-to-day meaning of the phrase, in his views of conservation issues, and his core ethics.

Yago and his wife Monica Chavez own and run Blue Nation diving in Loreto, Baja California Sur, Mexico, on the Sea of Cortez. Relative newcomers to the area, they have been making the effort to rethink the role of dive operators in the community as well as come up with new ways to attract customers.

Yago hails from Galicia in Spain and is by any standards a very good diver. With over 5000 dives in different locations around the world to his credit and experience in technical and cave diving, he is one of those divers that has made the tricky basics of diving–perfect buoyancy control, finning technique, managing and reconfiguring equipment underwater–second nature.

This means that he can hover motionless in a confined space just inches above the reef, without any risk of damaging anything living, while performing some complex task, such as removing lost fishing gear from a fan coral, and then fin backward out into open water again if he has to.

Yago, philosophical and outspoken by nature in most things, exhibits a quiet professional pride in his skills as a diver and is a proficient if demanding, diving instructor. The fact that he has been using his skills as a diver to remove fishing gear from fragile corals is, however, a source of frustration for him.

Forget for a moment that much abandoned or lost fishing gear is made from plastic of one form or another with all of the attendant pollution issues that this implies. Fishing gear, along with similar debris from boats of all kinds, hurts coral in a very specific and direct way: it cuts into it and the line itself provides a place for algae to bloom. The algae growing on the line then attacks the exposed coral polyps via the cut the line has made. If you or I get cut in some way we can take action to clean and protect the wound, ensuring that our bodies are not exposed to attack and risk of infection. Corals, while they are living things, lack this ability.

In conversation after diving, Yago accepts that fishing has been an important part of local, indeed human culture for centuries, and applauds the rules that the park has imposed on fishermen to use bio-degradable fishing hooks (while being skeptical about how many fishermen actually use them-they are, of course, more expensive than regular hooks.) He is, however, dismayed by the amount of lost or abandoned fishing gear he has seen underwater over the years.

This echoes other divers I have spoken with and data from diving community NGO ProjectAWARE. Beach cleaning efforts by surfing organizations and others turn up a wide variety of debris from multiple sources–plastic bottles are a big offender–but the debris that divers find is prominently fishing gear.

The Flip-Side of Community

While diving with Blue Nation we spent a day doing an exploration dive off submerged sea-mounts near the island of Monseratt–one of the islands in the Bahia Loreto National Park. A spectacular day of diving, but one that also gave us an opportunity to photograph Yago retrieving fishing line as we went along.

Yago reports fishing gear he finds when it contravenes park regulations, going so far as to provide GPS coordinates, but in his experience little action results. In our discussion, we speculated whether people are reluctant to “make waves” or “rock the boat,” euphemisms that could have been dreamed-up specifically to describe attitudes in fishing communities where no-one wants to make their neighbor angry.

This is the flip-side of the strong community argument that we have seen work in favor of conservation.

Time and again we have seen how strong communities can result in real positive momentum on the conservation of species and habitats. We’ve seen it in Scotland and we’ve seen it on the West Coast of Canada in multiple locations.

Much of it depends upon the attitude of fishermen, however. In short, if they are on-board, conservation efforts work, if they are not, they don’t. And this is going to become increasingly important as the focus on specific measures in support of conservation efforts increases. Why? Because you can’t talk about ocean conservation without talking about restricting fishing practices, if not entirely, then someway, somehow.

Fishermen impact every aspect of the ocean environment-species and habitat–and history has shown us that demand for fish and fish products if left unchecked can drive the fishing industry to extremes of resource extraction such that entire stocks of fish and marine mammals can collapse under the pressure.

So while both fishermen and divers impact the environment, divers witness the destruction first-hand.

Real Issues, Real Life

Yago, for this and other reasons, has become a vegetarian and doesn’t eat fish anymore. Further, he questions the moral validity of much of the conservation efforts we have seen over the years feeling that the subtext of much of it is to preserve ecosystems now so we can continue to exploit them later–recent developments in the International Whaling Commission (IWC) where Japan–a country that has opposed the moratorium placed on whaling since its inception–has now concluded that whale populations have now reached a level such that the IWC has reneged on the idea of allowing sustainable hunting of whales and has withdrawn its membership–a move that will see it switch from the highly controversial practice of so-called scientific whaling in Antarctica to commercial whaling in waters closer to home.

For now, Yago and Monica are focusing on finding ways to allow divers to explore the area with minimal impact and maximum adventure, and to secure funding for the installation of mooring buoys in the park so that vessels of all kinds can explore the area without having to drop anchor–another way in which boat traffic impacts fragile marine systems.

As we talked about all this over beers–the three of us–Monica was there as well–at the table of a restaurant in Loreto’s picturesque town square, I wondered how many of the people sitting at tables within earshot were fishermen of one kind of another: locals who fish for a living, gringos down for a week of some of the best sport fishing they’ve ever had, or anyone whose livelihood depends upon either of those groups, and was quietly thankful that I didn’t have to walk too far down dark streets to get back to my hotel.

These are real issues that affect people’s lives. Even while most of the experts I have spoken with feel that genuinely sustainable fishing, that is to say, fishing that allows a continual improvement of ocean ecologies, ought to be possible, the truth seems clear that much of what we do to further conservation efforts will include a focus on continuing to adjust fishing practices. The question is – how do we get everyone on board, including those fishermen who are reluctant to change.