Scott, kudos for being so up front. It's nice to see the whole picture of a diver and his dives laid out that simply and plainly.
I think our pre-diving life experiences mold us from early on, and determine our approach to something like this--how safe we'll stay, how we'll react to stressors. I'm no judge of others' competence, especially not from a distance.
I will offer a personal anecdote. I was solo once over a solid, flat, dirt bottom of forty feet in my local lake. I had enough air and no entrapment or injury. Nevertheless, I had issues related to how well the dive was going versus my plan. I started rushing things, then suddenly I actually felt panic rising. At that point I said "screw it all" to myself and started up, at what felt like a runaway pace. Looking at my dive profile later, I saw it was just over sixty feet per minute, the previous standard. It felt like a rocket, but that's because I'm used to going up at much less than thirty per minute and because I had abandoned responsibility for myself at that point.
At the surface, and later, I had a lot to think about. These days a continuous self-assesment is the topmost of the threads that run in my head while I'm down. I want to know how I'm feeling and whether I need to change what's going on before it escalates.
That's one reason you'll see posts that say, "never solo with a new piece of equipment, not even a new light." This can sound overly cautious, but it's sound advice. The smallest difficulty can tip us over the edge if we've allowed ourselves to get stressed.
Bryan
