Do not ever say you are a rescue diver

[Jim Lapenta]

No op, DM, boat, or instructor/guide can make you do anything you don't allow them to. The problem is people won't speak up for themselves. I always show my highest level instructor card and Adv Nitrox instructor if I want to dive that.
I have only been asked by an op twice to buddy up with someone that needed looking after. Both time I told them no. Piss off.
Not in those exact words but it amounted to the same thing. I told them my rate is $50-100 per dive depending on the dive. Payable in advance. The diver needs to sign a waiver I carry with me. And my boat ride is free.
If the diver burns through their air, I'll take them back to the boat and see they get on. Then I'll finish my dive.
That ended the conversation.
The op works for you. They are your employee. You are under NO obligation to babysit another diver. Tell them to kiss your ass if that's what they expect. If they are too damn cheap to hire an employee to dive with those who need it, they likely run a crap operation anyway and you should tell them so and find another op.

 

[doctormike]

Also, ABC did give way to CAB for the average person trying to do CPR on an adult who dropped right in front of them. Not necessarily because CAB is the best way to do resuscitations in an ideal circumstance, but because in the circumstances that exist in real life, where there’s one person there, who has had skill decay, and may not want to do breaths anyway, starting with compressions fast and hard at least circulates blood that still has oxygen in it, which does some good while waiting for EMS to arrive. For drowning victims, their blood isn’t well oxygenated so this process isn’t the one.

Yuip, exactly. CAB is completely irrelevant in the context of this discussion. It's ABC.

 

[BlueTrin]

The key point is that dive centres use your skill level to assess what type of diver you may be in order to buddy you with someone of a similar skill as they don't know how good or bad of a diver you really are.

If you care to read through the thread you will find responses to that effect.

But you can make a point that if you show a rescue or say that you are AOW with about the same number of dives, it does not make a difference for pairing if you pair similar levels?

 

[boulderjohn]

But you can make a point that if you show a rescue or say that you are AOW with about the same number of dives, it does not make a difference for pairing if you pair similar levels?

Who knows what they are thinking at that point, because it will all depend upon who else shows up. Let's say I am an operator with 3 boats, and I want to create an advanced, intermediate, and beginner boat. If I don't know the divers, I look at their credentials and assign them to boats accordingly. Who knows what will be the cutoff line for one boat or another?

If you are a mid-range diver looking to get onto a more advanced boat, you can be thankful that some of the beginning boat spots were taken by instructors or other advanced divers who smugly fooled the operator by showing a beginning card. Those people might bump you up to the more advanced boat.

 

[Leatherboot69]

Looking to the facts, in the U.K. (as I was briefed on a remote medicine course) someone who offers first aid will not be held liable for a victim as long as they act as *somebody else with the same level of training and experience could reasonably have been expected to act’ by a court; and also as long as they do not exceed their scope of practice. So anybody who says they’re only an OW rather than a RD because they’re worried about liability (in the U.K.)… smells like BS to me

 

[Searcaigh]

But you can make a point that if you show a rescue or say that you are AOW with about the same number of dives, it does not make a difference for pairing if you pair similar levels?

Well as @boulderjohn said:

Who knows what they are thinking at that point, because it will all depend upon who else shows up. Let's say I am an operator with 3 boats, and I want to create an advanced, intermediate, and beginner boat. If I don't know the divers, I look at their credentials and assign them to boats accordingly. Who knows what will be the cutoff line for one boat or another?

This is quite a similar practice that my usual dive op does. We have many sites immediately close to the dive op that are not suitable for OW divers as the depths range from 20-30m excluding the technical dives, so there is a 20-40min boat ride to more shallow dive sites suitable for OW divers. Therefore sometimes OW divers are occasionally bumped off if the additional boats are not operating either due to maintenance or weather.

On the other hand, if you use one of the dive ops that are closer to the shallower OW accessible areas you can end up doing shallow dives only on a boat full of OW qualified or OW students. There are of course deeper sites there too, but this is where the logistics of running shallow and deep dives come in, especially if you only have one boat, and this leads to the 50 bar 50 min rule being applied in order to ensure their schedule runs to time.

I will state that 100% of all the dives that are local to my regular dive op are square profile dives, further north the other dive sites are not so much, but around rocks you'll never surface next to them as the boats won't go too close for obvious reasons.

 

[Trace Malinowski]

It just dawned on me that when I worked as a dive guide in the Caribbean and Florida, I never knew anyone's certification level unless they told us on board. Someone from the staff might have given us a heads up that an instructor might be coming to work with students, and then the instructor would tell us on board, but the staff in the shop never told us anything other than how many we had on a charter. That held true for 4 ops for which I crewed. On the St. Lawrence River at St. Lawrence Scuba Co., the owner told me everyone's certification level.

 

[chillyinCanada]

It just dawned on me that when I worked as a dive guide in the Caribbean and Florida, I never knew anyone's certification level unless they told us on board. Someone from the staff might have given us a heads up that an instructor might be coming to work with students, and then the instructor would tell us on board, but the staff in the shop never told us anything other than how many we had on a charter. That held true for 4 ops for which I crewed. On the St. Lawrence River at St. Lawrence Scuba Co., the owner told me everyone's certification level.

But did you care?

Weren't you really considering what you saw underwater, regardless of any certification level?

 

[scubaozy]

But did you care?

Weren't you really considering what you saw underwater, regardless of any certification level?

Most of my diving is done with people I never met before. Whenever I provided bare minimum information about my qualifications and experience, the more uncomfortable I made the others. It is a good practice to talk about your past experiences with others before you enter the water. If you wait until you are in the water, you are more likely to get surprises.
Only risk I am taking by sharing this information is embarrassment or critisizm in the case I am not meeting perceived qualities of my communicated credentials.

 

[boulderjohn]

If there is anything I have learned over the years, it is to scout ahead and avoid to the greatest degree possible dive operators who either do not or cannot differentiate groups by ability. I will describe two examples to show what I mean.

1. I booked two days of diving with an operator because of the enthusiastic recommendation of a ScubaBoard veteran, despite my reservations because he had only one boat. The first day was wonderful. There was only one other diver, and he was good. We had a great day. The second day, we were joined by another couple, and the wife was one of the worst divers I have ever seen. The DM/operator spent the first 5-10 minutes of the first dive giving her a buoyancy lesson, and he spent the entirety of both dives holding her hand. We did two dives at her level. I will never dive with that operator again.

2. I dived this past June with another operator, and before we arrived, they asked for our certification and experience. On the first day, my friends and I were on a boat with very experienced divers, and we had a week of great dives.