Oh, I hear you, 4sak3n! From cave diving, I've got this built-in reflex that if my fins hit ANYTHING, I freeze. It makes doing dives with OW students really stressful, because they WILL insist on being behind me, and they DO get too close, and then I can't swim, and they can't hover . . . so it can become a bit of a problem. I've taken to turning around and facing them and just back-kicking
Peeves . . . relief valve failures are way up there, especially halfway through a 2 1/2 hour cave dive. People who leave big, honking, thick silt trails are up there, too. I loathe swimming through someone else's mess. Smokers on boats (or anywhere else, if I'm really honest).
And I have little patience with the dive buddy drama thing -- you know the kind of person I'm talking about, who always shows up without something, or something doesn't work, or they have to fuss and fix or go back to shore to get or . . . That kind of thing happens to everybody once in a while, but I'm sure we all know somebody who's like that ALL the time. The flip side of that is the person who's never happy . . . who always has to complain about the boat, or the site, or the crew, or the viz, or what they saw. I'm with airsix -- you'll never have a bad dive, if you look at what's there, and not what isn't!