Moderators! Please leave this thread in “Basic Scuba Discussion” it’s about the buddy system not the dreaded “S” word!
Is PADI warning new divers of things as basic as “Don’t run with scissors”?
In a recent thread, who’s title contained that dreaded and obscene (well, by PADI standards anyway) 4 letter word starting with “S”, the issue of PADI’s view on the buddy system was brought up. Since typing the “S” word here would immediately have this thread condemned to the bowels of a special forum for anti-social miscreants (like myself), I’ll have to spell the word with hyphens in between…
S-O-L-O
Now this thread isn’t about s-o-l-o diving, it’s about the harm PADI is doing by making this a taboo subject and going on and on and on about the dangers of being unattended by a buddy. Let’s face it; many buddies are “inattentive” to begin with so you are unattended anyway at times whether you planned it that way or not.
Many of us feel that PADI’s stance on s-o-l-o diving is really a PADI argument for the buddy system, or more accurately, for the PADI version of the buddy system –ie- “never mention a diver can be safe alone, insist that you are only safe with another diver, no matter how newly minted, just out of the box he or she is”.
A little history:
Back in the day, one of the first scuba certifying agencies was the YMCA and when they started teaching scuba they brought their complete swimming program over to their scuba syllabus. They had a rule in their swimming program, ‘Never swim alone; always swim with a buddy’ and that became ‘Never dive alone; always dive with a buddy.”
This rule wasn’t the result of countless hours of research backed up by reams of paper with statistical calculations filling both sides. It was just ‘that sounds like it applies’…” by whoever was converting the one course to the other.
My Views:
I think we, as instructors, should move the focus of the training to self-reliance, self-rescue and solving underwater problems underwater and making it a last resort to either run to a buddy or pop to the surface in an emergency. We should do this right from the start, from open water training, so the concept is instilled in newly minted open water divers.
Okay, now to the question! I’d like to hear from both open water divers and instructors what your opinion is.
Should we be teaching more self-reliance?
or
Is the current PADI version of the buddy system the correct approach?