Technical diving is scuba diving that exceeds the depth, immersion time and gas limits of recreational diving for a non-professional purpose. Technical diving includes extensive equipment and often involves breathing multiple gases other than air or standard nitrox mixtures. Technical diving may expose the diver to hazards beyond those normally associated with recreational diving, and to greater risk of serious injury or death. The risk may be reduced by appropriate skills, knowledge and experience, and by using suitable equipment and procedures. The skills may be developed through appropriate specialised training and experience

Sidemount is a scuba diving equipment configuration which has scuba sets mounted alongside the diver, below the shoulders and along the hips, instead of on the back of the diver. It originated as a configuration for advanced cave diving, as it facilitates penetration of tight sections of cave, allows easy access to cylinder valves, provides easy and reliable gas redundancy, and tanks can be easily removed when necessary. These benefits for operating in confined spaces were also recognized by divers who conducted technical wreck diving penetrations. Sidemount diving is now growing in popularity within the technical diving community for general decompression diving, and is becoming an increasingly popular specialty training for recreational diving, with several diver certification agencies offering recreational and technical level sidemount training programs.

CCR is short for Closed Circuit Rebreather. A rebreather is a breathing apparatus that absorbs the carbon dioxide of the diver's exhaled breath to permit the rebreathing of the substantially unused oxygen or sometimes oxygen and helium. Oxygen is then added to replenish the amount metabolised by the diver. This differs from an open-circuit breathing apparatus (your normal scuba regulator), where the exhaled gas is discharged directly into the environment.The benefits for the diver is less gas consumption (as the vast majority is recycled) and the ability to always breathe an optimized gas mix.

From Bangkok you can get to Koh Tao with either a combination of plane and ferry, train and ferry or bus and ferry. You can fly to either Koh Samui, Chumphon or Suratthani and then get a connecting ferry to Koh Tao. Bangkok Air and Thai Airways have routes to Koh Samui, Nok Air have routes to Chumphon, Air Asia have routes to Surat Thani and Lomprayah, Seatran and Songserm have ferry connections to Koh Tao. Lomprayah also has a combined bus and ferry service from Bangkok to Koh tao. You can also take the train from Bangkok to Chumphon and then the Lomprayah Ferry to Koh Tao.

To dive!