History
The DIR approach (and name) evolved out of the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP) in the mid-1990s, where the objective was conducting dives in a very high risk environment: Not only cave diving, but also deep, long duration and exploration of previously unknown parts of a very large cave system.
The origins of the approach to equipment taken by DIR practitioners can be found in the 'Hogarthian' equipment configuration attributed to William Hogarth Main. These individuals, along with many others, were attempting to develop equipment and procedures to allow the safer exploration of the deep submerged caves in the area.
Successfully carrying out the advanced diving required for deep cave penetration, as in the Woodville Karst Plain Project, places a great need to focus on the fundamentals of exactly how such diving should be carried out, and how equipment should be selected and configured for this type of diving, to maximise mission effectiveness and minimise risk.
The DIR approach was originally confined to cave diving, but soon spread to other forms of technical diving. Since recreational diving is the natural source of future technical divers, the DIR philosophy was extended into this field, although the recreational practices were already considered acceptably low risk by most diver certification agencies and insurance companies.
The phrase "Doing It Right" as applied to diving is thought to have appeared in 1995 in an article by George Irvine III. Irvine and Jarrod Jablonski eventually formalized and popularized this approach as DIR, promoting its practises for all forms of scuba diving. Irvine's polemic style and inflexible stance led to a great deal of controversy and, while popularizing the style among some people, repelled many others. This has begun to ameliorate somewhat. . As of 2009, there are at least two US-based dive training organizations, Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) and Unified Team Diving (UTD), and many independent dive instructors who teach a DIR style of diving. GUE renamed its 'DIR Fundamentals' course to 'GUE Fundamentals' in 2007, distancing itself somewhat from the acronym "DIR".
UTD completely change the DIR methodology to better suit their sidemount and CCR classes, not DIR by definition.
Since 2010 International Diving Research & Exploration Organization (IDREO) promotes DIR Exploration and it's techniques have been offered to qualified divers through Seminars, in order to join Cave like Exploration Projects that by definition go beyond traditional recreational and technical diving limits.
In particular:
Aspect | Rationale | Implications |
---|---|---|
Team diving | The logistical complexity of deep cave diving requires a team effort if goals are to be achieved. |
|
Dive planning | Deep cave diving requires a comprehensive and detailed plan. The parameters and dive profiles for such a plan generally require meticulous pre-dive computations and preparation to mitigate the considerable risk. Such planning is rendered pointless if it is not adhered to. |
|
Technical diving/ Cave diving | Deep, decompression diving is necessarily required to effect penetration diving on the WKPP. Extended dive duration and surveys of previously unexplored parts of the cave system exposed divers to unprecedented exposures. Diving of this type is subject to increased level of risk and increased risks require more stringent mitigation. |
|
Read more about this topic: Doing It Right
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We may pretend that were basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by handa center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“If usually the present age is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (18551916)