National Independent Divers Association, LLC
Where solo divers meet extreme environments and technical instructors meet challenging demands.
Who We Are
NIDA is the first organization to focus on the practice of solo scuba diving across all environments, including wreck penetration, technical mixed-gas diving, and cave diving.
Our programs emphasize risk literacy, disciplined planning, and self-reliance in conditions where direct ascent is not possible.
Even with instruction and training, these activities involve significant risk, including serious injury, permanent injury, or death. Participants are responsible for their own decisions, preparation, and outcomes.
NIDA Courses
NIDA Wreck Penetration
Learn basic and advanced techniques to explore the interiors of sunken wrecks.
NIDA Solo Wreck Diver
Wreck diving has traditionally attracted solo divers, but they have often been unprepared for the rigors and dangers of shipwreck interiors. Learn skills that will help improve survivability.
NIDA Cavern Diver
A safety course that introduces the student to the importance of springs and underwater caverns, how to properly enter overhead environments, and the skills needed to reduce risk.
NIDA Cave Diver 1: Limited Range
Learn to venture beyond the daylight zone and swim through gold line tunnels using a maximum of 1/6th of your starting gas suuply.
NIDA Cave Diver 2: Unlimited Range
Learn to make complex navigational decisions in underwater caves involving jumps, gaps, circuits and traverses using a maximum of 1/3 of your starting gas supply.
NIDA Advanced Cave Diver
Learn to use stage bottles and diver propulsion vehicles (DPVs) in the cave environment.
NIDA Solo Cave Diver
Solo cave diving requires more than just a buddy bottle. A diver’s mindset, focus, skills, and creative problem solving abilities must be tested and honed to offer the best chance to survive the most unforgiving environment under the earth’s surface.
NIDA B.E.T.T.E.R.â„¢ Diver
Improve your Buoyancy, Equipment configuration and streamlining, Trim, Techniques for diving in silty environments, Environmental awareness, and Risk management in NIDA’s introduction to technical diving course.
NIDA Technical Diver 1: Accelerated Decompression for the Air & Nitrox Diver
Learn decompression diving and the use of oxygen mixtures between 40% and 100% to reduce mandatory stop times.
NIDA Technical Diver 2: Trimix
Reduce gas narcosis and work of breathing by using helium mixtures.
NIDA Solo Technical Diver
Arguably, the use of hypoxic and hyperoxic mixes without team safeguards might be the most dangerous form of solo diving. While risk cannot be eliminated, this course will attempt to reduce the risk.
Meet the CEO
Trace Malinowski brings over 35 years of experience in scuba, technical, cave, and freediving instruction and evaluation, including senior leadership roles in training agency operations. He has served as Training Director for PDIC and PSAI and spent four years on the World Recreational Scuba Training Council.
His awards include the SSI Platinum Pro 5000 Diver Award and the Hal Watts Elite Cave Diver Award. He is also an ocean rescue lifeguard, GUE Tech 2 Diver, NSS-CDS and IUCRR cave recovery diver, and a two-mission aquanaut in Jules’ Undersea Lab.
He views NIDA as a community of risk-aware, collaborative divers building something deliberately different.
Meet Speargun
Speargun is a Hemingway cat and NIDA’s Chief Grievance Officer. He earned his name because he cost exactly the same as a speargun from Australia that Trace was considering buying.
He was sharp and a little dangerous as a kitten. These days, he prefers naps and the occasional belly rub. No one risk-aware has yet attempted to wake him to file a complaint.
Let’s Stay in Touch
Questions about NIDA training, workshops, or professional development? Get in touch. We’ll help you figure out your next step.
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