Diving with first time buddies

[Dad_Crush]

I had a great experience recently diving with someone and his wife who turned out to be firefighter EMTs and their non-diving camping partners were first responders. Couldn't have asked for better people. This raises the question...I would have walked away from the dive if I had gotten a bad vibe from these folks I just met...what things (subtle and not-so-subtle) would make you walk away from someone who is to be your dive partner? What have been your experiences?

 

[fisherdvm]

I try my best to walk away from folks with cameras, especially for drift diving. You burn up alot of air chasing after the DM in mexico, where the boat follow the main group, and not the single divers. Photographers are the worst buddies.

New divers are great to dive with, as they are attentive, and appreciative. Only problem is that you'll have to often end the dive earlier. I got 3 dives with a young man, who had to run back and get a third tank, on my 1 tank. Not to say my air consumption is great, it is just that his is very bad.

 

[emttim]

I try my best to walk away from folks with cameras, especially for drift diving. You burn up alot of air chasing after the DM in mexico, where the boat follow the main group, and not the single divers. Photographers are the worst buddies.

New divers are great to dive with, as they are attentive, and appreciative. Only problem is that you'll have to often end the dive earlier. I got 3 dives with a young man, who had to run back and get a third tank, on my 1 tank. Not to say my air consumption is great, it is just that his is very bad.

I think it depends entirely on the person. Kmmkiwi was a very good buddy and she used her camera on the third dive; I didn't notice any less attention to myself or the dive in general even with the use of the camera.

As far as new divers go, yes generally their air consumption isn't very good, but again it depends on the person...she has less dives than I do (as of the date we dived anyway) and her air consumption makes mine look ridiculously poor, and I know mine isn't that bad since it's better than everyone I went through OW, AOW & Rescue with.

I think it depends entirely on the instructor as the other thread on here alluded to...I'm sure there's plenty of new divers who don't know crap, aren't attentive and generally shouldn't even have been certified.

Although to the OP, the things that would give me a bad vibe are overconfidence, not a lot of logged dives recently, things of that nature. The very first questions I ask everyone I am considering diving with is "how focused on safety procedures are you? Do you do pre-dive safety checks? Do you believe in staying close to your buddy?" I figure if the answer is "no" or "I don't care" to any of those questions, then that constitutes an unsafe diver who I don't want to be around.

So far, everyone I've dived with I've had a positive experience though, so I don't really have any bad stories of instabuddies as of yet. Although if I have my way, I won't be diving with anyone outside my normal group or kmmkiwi unless someone else on here needs a buddy the day I'm diving where they are since I know bad instabuddies are out there and I'd rather have one person I do trust to dive with even if the 3rd person is an instabuddy.

 

[1_T_Submariner]

I have dove with a number of people that I didn't know before diving with them. I try to be very attentive to where they are what they are doing etc... I have had good luck with them.

I'll dive with anyone ONCE.

 

[TSandM]

I'd walk away from somebody who wasn't willing to sit down and do a dive plan, or who wouldn't do a pre-dive check with me, or who wouldn't agree that we start the dive, do the dive and end the dive together.

 

[Thumpers]

True story.
A friend comes home from a Cancun trip, (I think it was Cancun) and was griping about his dive buddy. He said they were on this dive and she had been assigned as his dive buddy. Then were down at about 80 feet and were entering a tunnel. He noticed he was low on air, but figured the divemaster new what he was doing so he went into the tunnel. As they came out the other side, his air went dry. He turned to his dive buddy and gave the out of air sign to his dive buddy. His dive buddy gave him the OK message back and then a wait sign.
"Wait?" The guy is out of air and you are saying wait?
Anyway the dive buddy went off to get the divemaster. LOL.
So my buddy grabbed someone else and sucked air off them to the surface.
Now this guys complained and complained about his dive buddy.
My answer was.
"If you died, she would have felt horrible. But probably would still have eaten lunch and might even have made the afternoon dive."
In other words, never trust anyone but yourself. If you think you are low on air, don't trust the divemaster, divebuddy or anyone else. You make that call yourself.
Remember it is your life at risk, they might toast your memory at dinner but you are the one gone.

 

[Alex777]

I am often buddy-less on the dive boats, so I have had many insta-buddies. I avoid: photographers, divers without computers, and people who go WAY out of their way to impress me with their training & experience. Everyone else is fine. I particularly enjoy diving with relatively inexperienced tourist divers.

 

[Sas]

Hmm, I will pretty much dive with anybody (once at least) and when regular buddies are free I will show up on a boat anyway, and try my luck with instabuddies. They have all been lovely and very helpful - one guy I had a bad experience with but he was an inexperienced diver and it was not him being deliberately difficult to dive with. He tried his best! The only thing that would put me off is really arrogant people. They are the ones that don't stick to dive plans, and don't think they need to have checks and things like that.

When I started diving I thought 'I will never dive with a photographer' as I had been paired up with one on a Night dive course and he was a pain, not very attentive, etc, and he would swim off to find critters and leave me behind. I have changed my mind though, as my regular buddies have cameras and I am used to how people work with cameras - and I really like finding critters for them to photograph Like a treasure hunt!

But yea, there are some dives I have decided to only do with regular buddies - deeper dives, wrecks, shore dives with long swims to dive sites or difficult entry/exits, and probably night dives as well.

 

[Rick Inman]

I'll pretty much dive with anyone (at least once). I just very the dive parameters to fit my comfort based on my best-guess assessment. My only exception has been when there is too much pre-dive chest thumping and it looks like the guy (never been a female like this) has something to prove. Even then, I have sometimes done easy dives with people like this, just to see if the talk equals the walk. I'm sure that when I got back into diving and met up with some quality divers, in my nervousness I may have let my mouth run a bit, and those folks were good enough to dive with me and make it obvious how much I really sucked - just by their example.

I'd walk away from somebody who wasn't willing to sit down and do a dive plan, or who wouldn't do a pre-dive check with me...

Some guy came to our Tuesday dive group, and after watching us do our pre-dive stuff (GUE EDGE), shook his head and made some comments under his breath about baby-divers, how he has too much experience to be diving like a child, etc... and he never came back. In most cases, the rare kind of people I prefer not to dive with just seem to eliminate themselves anyway, so it must be mutual.

 

[Sinbad the Diver]

I'm new at this so take it for what it's worth, but so far I've had good, OK and real bad buddy ups. The good and OK (people I'd dive with again in a minute) our predive check was colaborative (we each talked about our gear, each had input into the plan, etc).

The buddy I won't dive with again I ran the show, it was one sided, I had to go through his gear and figure out what it was and pretty much had to plan the dive myself. I'm sure some people that are perfectly good divers are happy to have someone lay it all out for them and lead and I have a tendancy to dominate a conversation if someone is not contributing, but when I give them the opportunity and they don't , it's something that I now keeep an eye out for. When we dove he was just as tentative and I feel strongly that if I had had an issue I would have been on my own to resolve it (his reaction to being uncomfortable and calling it was to surface, computer screaming the whole way up), leaving me twice to make a controlled ascent with safety stop, wondering the whole time if he was OK.