Most people researching their first technical course ask what it costs and how long it takes. Both answers are on the course page: €730, three days, five dives.
This is the other conversation. The one that happens on the first morning, and occasionally ends with somebody being told to come back later.
The short version of what MOD 1 is
A recreational diver is limited by the no-decompression limit. When the computer counts down to zero, the dive is over. Decompression is treated as an emergency.
MOD 1 replaces that ceiling with a skill set. A decompression obligation stops being a problem you escaped and becomes a plan you wrote before entering the water.
MOD 1 is to technical diving what Open Water is to recreational diving. It is the foundation, and everything above it assumes you have it.
That is the whole explanation. The rest of this page is about whether you should be on the course at all.
How many dives you actually need
IANTD standards ask for 30 logged dives, plus Deep Diver and Nitrox Diver certifications. Minimum age 15.
Yurii’s own bar is higher: at least 50 dives.
Not because the standard is wrong. Because 30 dives buys you the skills, and 50 buys you the spare attention to learn new ones. On MOD 1 you are learning while managing three cylinders and a ceiling you cannot swim through. If basic diving still takes up all your concentration, there is nothing left over.
An instructor setting a bar above the agency’s is unusual. It is worth knowing before you compare centres on price.
Missing the prerequisites is not a problem — Deep and Nitrox can be taken in combination with MOD 1 rather than as separate trips.
What actually stops a course
Two things, and neither is about experience on paper.
Buoyancy that is not there yet. We work hard on this — teaching buoyancy is part of the job, not an excuse to send someone home. But below a certain level, three cylinders and a decompression ceiling stop being a training environment and become a hazard.
Unsafe behaviour. Ignoring a plan, ignoring a briefing, treating depth as a dare. Not negotiable, and usually visible on the first dive.
Nobody is turned away for learning slowly. People are turned away for not being ready to be responsible for themselves.
What divers find hardest
Three things, in the order they usually bite.
Three cylinders at once
Two bottom cylinders plus a decompression gas. If you have never dived sidemount, you have spent your whole diving life managing one cylinder that somebody else clipped on for you. Now there are three, they do different jobs, and you need to know which is which without looking.
Configuration is your choice — sidemount or twinset both work. Prior sidemount experience makes the course noticeably easier.
The volume of theory
This surprises people badly. Divers who trained where the theory was handed over as self-study reading feel it hardest — the material was minimised for them, and nobody ever asked them to work through it properly.
On MOD 1 it is not optional and it is not fast.
Reading your own dive computer
A surprising number of experienced divers cannot interpret the data their computer is showing them. They were never taught to. On a decompression dive that is not a gap you can leave open.
Two to three dives of fighting
Realistically, two to three of the five dives go into simply stopping the fight with the equipment.
That is normal. It is not a sign you were not ready. Every diver arrives over-equipped relative to their habits, and the habits catch up somewhere around dive three.
What has to change is not a skill. It is discipline — and that change happens in your head, not your hands.
The mistake is not starting too early
It is not starting at all.
Divers with recreational cards go to technical depths without the training, the configuration or the gas planning. They think a deep dive is an adrenaline experience — something you go and get.
It is the opposite. Technical diving is a cold head and exact arithmetic. The excitement is in the planning being right. If a technical dive feels like adrenaline, something has gone wrong.
The people who worry they are not ready are almost never the problem. The problem is the divers who never wondered.
About 45 metres and 51 metres
A point of confusion worth clearing up, because our own price list shows a range.
Under IANTD standards:
| Certification | Maximum depth |
|---|---|
| Advanced EANx (Advanced Nitrox) Diver | 45 m |
| Advanced Recreational Trimix Diver | 45 m |
| Advanced Recreational Trimix Plus Diver | 51 m |
MOD 1 is a 45-metre certification, whichever bottom gas you choose. The 51 metres belongs to Plus — an optional add-on taken afterwards, which most divers never take and nothing later in the technical path requires.
Within those 45 metres there is no decompression limit set by the card. Your limit is your own gas consumption and your own safety standards. That is a very different relationship with a dive plan than most divers have had before.
Which bottom gas suits you is a separate question, and it is answered on the course page — the short version is that it depends on how narcosis affects you personally.
Where you go afterwards
Two paths.
MOD 2 on open circuit. Normoxic trimix, deeper, longer decompression. It works, and helium costs real money on every single dive.
Move to a rebreather. The part most people do not know: MOD 1 lets you enter CCR training directly at CCR MOD 1, skipping the recreational rebreather levels entirely. If you expect to dive deep regularly, the gas cost argument usually decides this within a year.
Either way the recommendation is the same: dive in technical mode for a while before the next course. Not a fixed number of months — long enough that the configuration is boring and the planning is automatic.
The thing people get wrong before they call
One sentence: “it is very expensive, very difficult, and not for me.”
Three days, five dives, €730, fully equipped. Less than a stack of recreational specialties, and the largest single jump in capability available to a diver.
And the question people ask before booking is almost never the useful one. When Yurii was working in Sharm el-Sheikh, every prospective student asked the same thing: “will we dive through the arch at the Blue Hole in Dahab?” Nobody asked what they would be able to plan, calculate or survive afterwards.
Ask the second question.
Still unsure whether you are ready? Tell us how many dives you have and how narcosis affects you. That is genuinely all we need to answer it.