We dive as buddy pairs. If there are three, then I am part of a three person buddy team. You're trying to force a round peg in a square hole here. I don't teach like you do so I don't need a special buddy.
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Apparently you DON'T get it. I watch my students clear their masks during the dive AS THEY NEED IT. I do teach my students to use their safety stops to practice drills, so we might do something at this point. Our dives are simply that: DIVES. I see instructors hurrying up with doing the serial skills that they MUST see done in OW and smile. I got all that done in the pool.
I would never call you dense... but try to Scuba Dive without those skills. It's just not possible. After the skills are mastered in the pool, I want to see my students actually DIVE. They have to show me competency. It's a huge departure from the serial skill mentality and I love it. Why? It's producing a superior product. Competency is the next logical step after mastery and that's what I need to see on their dives.All skills are taught in the swimming pool, and none need to be demonstrated during the actual OW dives.
...//...but when the doo doo flew, he abandoned me, freaked out. What I did was wrong, I learned my lesson well. I am much more cautious,.... maybe even too cautious at times. ...//...
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Worse, you have places in the Bahamas that advertise taking you down to over 180 feet on air. Beyond stupid.
We could have a discussion about what is and isn't a sensible MOD for air on a given dive, but last I checked even with the current (and very conservative) 1.4 working PPO2, air has a MOD of ~190'. Lots of people have opinions about at the depth at which narcosis is extreme enough to warrant using helium--not a single one of them is an objective fact.
A comment that 'all dives to 180' on air are beyond stupid' reveals more about the speaker's narrow-mindedness and ignorance of diving's history than it does about the intelligence of someone executing a dive to 180' with air for backgas.