Mark Powell had his first experience of diving at the age of 10 when he did a try-dive in a local pool. He was hooked from that point onwards. He learnt to dive in 1987 and has been diving ever since. He has dived in the Red Sea, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka, California, Gulf of Mexico, the Middle East, Caribbean and the Mediterranean. However he is most at home in the waters around the UK where there is some of the best wreck diving in the world.
Mark became an instructor in 1994 and has been actively instructing since then. In 2002 Mark set up Dive-Tech, a dedicated technical diving facility, with the intention of providing the highest quality technical diving training. He has been a full time diving instructor since then. Dive-Tech provides technical training at all levels up to and including CCR Advanced Mixed Gas Instructor Trainer. It also provides consultancy services to other diving organisations.
Mark is a TDI Instructor Trainer and a member of TDI’s Global Training Advisor Panel. He is a regular contributor to a number of diving magazines and a regular speaker at Diving conferences around the world. Mark represents TDI on the British Diving Safety Group and the HSE Recreational Diving Industry Committee as well as being a member of the Diver Training and Breathing Apparatus committees at the British Standards Institute.
In 2008 Mark published Deco for Divers, a widely acclaimed overview of the theory and physiology of decompression. This has quickly become the standard text on the subject and is recommended reading by a number of the technical diving agencies. In 2010 Deco for divers was awarded “Publication of the Conference” at the EuroTEK.10 technical diving conference and in 2014 it won the Media Award at TekDive USA. Mark’s passion is wreck diving and spends all his spare time diving the wrecks around the coastline of the UK and abroad and has led expeditions to a wide range of locations around the world. He is currently involved in a number of projects including documenting the wreck of HMS Hermes, the worlds first custom aircraft carrier, as well as searching for the other wrecks that were sank at the same time as HMS Hermes. He is also involved in an ongoing project to identify a number of unknown Second World War wrecks.
