Tech week. Also known as deep week. Three, four times a year, we offer a technical charter to divers qualified to venture onto the deeper wrecks. What counts as qualified? Well, the main qualification seems to be that you have to pack a lot of expensive stuff that weighs a bunch and is no fun to carry. Second qualification is that you be able to actually put on said expensive heavy stuff and use it without hurting yourself. It’s often the second one that catches folks. But when it works, it works, and boy is it a good time.
Technical diving in Truk is fairly tame in comparison to much of the technical diving that goes on around the world. There’s no place in the lagoon deeper than 250’, and the deepest wreck is 220’, just at the limit of safe air diving, so there’s no need to remove part of the nitrogen in the breathing gas and replace it with something inert like helium, nor must one dial down the percentage of oxygen for the deepest portion of the dive, obviating the need for a separate travel gas used during ascent and descent that is different than the bottom gas used for the actual dive. The lagoon is calm, so no current lines, granny lines, down lines, or John lines, or the fear of rough water entries and exits. Also easy to find the boat at the end of the dive, where there will be sweet sweet hundred percent O2 decompression goodness from surface supplied regulators hanging at 15’, eliminating the need to haul around every breath of decompression gas needed. Calm water also means it’s possible to hang from a bar at the back of the boat to decompress and slurp said O2 without getting tossed around like a rag doll. The water is warm, so leave the serious exposure suits, the dry suits, and the large amounts of lead needed to sink them at home next to the dry suit inflation hose and separate bottle of insulating argon used as a nonconductive barrier against freezing water. The visibility is passable, so goodbye braille diving. We tie in directly to the wrecks, so no wandering around, searching for the dive site at 200’. When you consider some of the crazy technical diving people do, under ice or at 300’+ or thousands of horizontal feet inside a cave system, sometimes all three at once, Truk is small time.
Fact remains, however, that nowhere else in the world is there such a concentration of shipwrecks in such good shape, and to get to the deep ones, specialized gear and training are necessary. This is not reef diving, nor is it swim over the top of a jumbled pile of metal that was once a wreck wreck diving. You want to get serious, you can wander around three decks deep inside the sideways tilted collapsing engine room of a WWII Japanese ship that’s been underwater for 67 years, black as night and covered in powder fine silt that kicks up in clouds and creates an impenetrable rust storm with every exhalation and misdirected fin swipe, 200’ down and surrounded by decaying live ordnance and human remains. In other words, put on the game face along with the gear and know what you’re doing when you come out for tech week.
Be prepared to see places that not many folks frequent. Chuuk gets about five thousand tourists a year, most of them divers, and even though this place is known as a mecca for technical wreck diving, a vast majority of visiting divers see only the shallower wrecks. There is little traffic on the deep wrecks. Finding them, taking enough gear to explore them, getting back safely, none of these things are simple. Less traffic means less wear and tear, less day boats dragging grappling hooks across the coral trying to tie in, less careless or sticky fingered divers abusing or pilfering from the wrecks. With such light traffic, it is easy to feel, while wandering around a superstructure seeing half buried china and the detritus of daily life haphazardly scattered, that no one has been poking around here for a while; some of the places we access during deep week, maybe not since the ship sank. Exhilarating. Also, being deep, the wrecks take less of a beating from the elements: less growth, less water movement and wear and tear. The shallower wrecks we visit on a weekly basis look how you’d imagine a shipwreck to look in your mind’s eye: lot’s of growth and decay that lends spooky ambiance. The deep stuff often looks, from a distance, like it hasn’t changed since the day it sank, and that’s exciting in a different, more exploratory and less we’re on a ride at Disney way.
So what does tech diving in Truk look like? Take a 200’ wreck. The whole wreck isn’t that deep, but some of the interesting bits, like the engine room, or the bottom of the cargo holds, or something out in the sand that got thrown clear of the wreck as it blew up or sank are. Have to breathe air instead of nitrox, as the added oxygen content in nitrox, denitrogenated air, can be toxic at that depth and can cause seizures. So the air lets you go deeper, but you load more nitrogen faster, leading to shorter bottom time and longer decompression requirements, as well as a dance with friend/ foe narcosis, the stupor that can hit at depth. Fill the tank with air. Tanks, actually; most technical divers here use dual tanks connected by a manifold that allows one tank to be isolated from the other in case of failure on one side. Shut down the intertank connection and you can save half your gas if you are having a problem. Also means you can haul more air. Redundant regulators, the things you breath from, run independently to each tank. Then there are the other hoses involved, inflation, pressure gauges, etc. Takes a lot to get the air from your tanks to your body in an easy to access fashion.
And those are just the tanks on your back. Breathing that air at depth is going to squeeze a bunch of nitrogen into your system, and when you ascend, you’re going to want a gas leaner in nitrogen and thus higher in oxygen content to coax all that nitrogen out of your system. Think of it like two interconnected pools: the larger the height difference between the pools, the faster the water wants to flow from the higher pool to the lower pool. The water in this case is nitrogen in your body trying to escape. The less nitrogen you’re taking into your lungs when you breathe, the lower the other pool is, the faster that nitrogen leaves. So, fill a small tank with something between 50 and 100% oxygen, breathe it as you get closer to the surface, and feel that nitrogen jump from your blood to your lungs and out with your exhalations instead of lodging in your joints and spine. Ideally. Gotta have a way to breathe off that small tank and tell how much gas is in there, so that’s another regulator and the attendant clips needed to strap the whole mess to your body.
The mess grows exponentially when you add a floatation system, lights, cutting devices, spools of line to spin out like a trail of nylon bread crumbs on the way into and hopefully out of a wreck, inflatable marker buoys, redundant diving computers, writing surface to make notes, an exposure suit to keep you warm on a long dive, maybe a camera rig to record the dive, and a harness upon which to strap everything, the list goes on indefinitely. It all becomes quite a bundle. Worth every wiggle and strain getting into and carrying all the stuff when you get to do what comes next, though.
It is a thrill to sink a hundred feet and more before you even get deep enough to begin to see the top of the masts of the ship. Lots of water overhead. Then the hazy outline of the wreck comes into view. Get oriented, then head off to the part you want to explore. If you have on your game face, go inside. The choices are yours, you are being effected by the environment into which you have ventured, and your adventure and your health are dictated solely upon how you comport yourself. Don't know about you, but I don't think like that during day to day cross the street life. Down here, though, as I decide to go down that one more stairwell, take another turn away from daylight, round that one sketchy looking beam that may or may not be sturdily supporting tons of metal overhead, all with narcosis tickling the edges of consciousness like that one last ill advised cocktail before a ride in the car, it all comes into pinpoint focus. Trite to discuss T-shirt slogan if you aren't living on the edge you're just taking up space silliness, but tech week provides opportunity to not only see amazing places but to feel truly alive while seeing them.
Go deep, stay a while, have fun snooping around, then head up. Stop about half way from your deepest depth, pause. Ascend ten feet. Pause. Repeat repeatedly, easing your body back to the surface and allowing the nitrogen time to work itself out of your system. Get to the maximum safe depth for whatever your decompression gas is rated for. Turn on your deco gas, switch regulators, and slam your lungs with an oxygen rich, nitrogen poor gas that speeds decompression. Continue to ascend and pause, taking longer stops the closer you get to the surface. Find the back of the boat, where the surface supplied oxygen is hanging at 15’. Switch regulators again and huff O2 until your dive plan dictates that you are sufficiently off gassed to surface. Climb aboard, slowly, so that nothing in your system gets fizzy like a shaken soft drink. Congratulate yourself and others on once again spitting in the eye of death. Compare nitrogen narcosis addled notes on what you actually remember seeing in the depths. That’s what tech diving looks like around here. It’s nothing I’d want to subject myself to every week, as deep diving is rough on the bod and big oxygen cylinders are really heavy to get on and off the boat and who do you think has to fill all those little decompression bottles, but tech week is a wonderful departure from the usual routine, gives us a chance to break out the big boy toys, and allows access to some great, less often dived wrecks that still hold mystery, wonder, history, and a tickle of Indiana Jones thrill.
