Drift diving, what you've learned?

[miketsp]

Unfortunately, many dive opts are on a tight schedule .... I know that to push 3 dives in a day (8am, 1 pm, and 5 pm), they can not affort to puddle around looking for floating divers. I know that they are very prompt at ending dives at 35 minutes, irregardless of how much air you have left. Then you deal with the newbies that forgot their weight belt, can't go up, can't equalized, etc... You really don't want to pizzies the DM off by making them miss lunch, etc.

I think to be courteous, one should try to remain with the group in an organized drift dive. If they have to waste time and gas looking for you, I'm sure that you will not be welcomed on the next dive.

I don't know who you dive with in Coz but that's certainly not my experience. Before answering I checked my log from my last trip and there was only one dive of less than 40 minutes and that was because of the profile. All the others were well over 40 minutes and I never sensed the slightest stress with the DMs. The DM was certainly not restricting the dive time.
Although I must admit the DMs did have a pretty easy life with us because we normally travel as a group and then split into 2 boats, those with less experience and those with more.
On our more experienced group the dives went off like clockwork and even though the buddy pairs would regularly get split up we were all doing similar run times and with the exception of the night dive I mentioned I'm sure our SMBs were popping up well within visibility of the boat.
The interesting thing is that on some of the dives, even though we took different tracks across the reef and it looked as though we would get well separated, in fact when we got onto the sandy area at the end of the reef, the group would naturally reform and we ended up surfacing together.

 

[fairybasslet]

During the 50 minutes I mentioned at least 3 or 4 other dive boats saw our lights, came up, checked if we belonged to them, asked us the name of our boat and then moved on. If we'd been in any sort of difficulty I'm sure help was at hand.
It was quite relaxing really just bobbing there looking up at the stars and watching all the traffic. There were divers on the surface with lights all over the place and a lot of dive boats.

OK, that's not too bad. I think that as long as there were other people around I would have felt pretty safe. I was drift diving in Florida and got blown off the reef into deep water. When I surfaced after my SS, all by myself in the great big ocean, I saw the captain looking the other way (where the divers were supposed to be) for about 10 minutes (it seemed like 30 ) before he turned around and saw my SMB. To this day, I don't know why I didn't use my Diver Alert or whistle to get his attention. I guess I kept thinking "He'll see me any minute now."

 

[TheDavil]

Lesson: Don't combine your first week of drift diving in Coz with taking your underwater camera down for the first time.

That diminished the enjoyment of both activities for me.

 

[deepblueme]

Wait till your on that next Drift and you come to a dead stop in the water then notice that your group are sinking down the reef even though they are "treading water".

That is a downwelling current and we had this happen to a group while in Coz. The DM had never seen one happen there before.

I was lucky to notice what was going on as they were sinking below me as I was about 50ft from the "wall" taking in the "big picture" and wasn't sinking. Took me a Min. to figure out why they had stopped and were decending while swimming up.