Let's face it...Oysters usually travel to dive.
As an Oyster with a non-diving wife, I begin most of my dives trying to find a dive buddy among the strangers on a boat. In the past year or so, I have had a lot of miserable luck with that. The point of this post can be illustrated by contrasting two dives I had this week.
A. On Thursday, I went with a dive op in Florida and had yet another bad experience with the insta-buddy system--to summarize quickly, my second dive, to moderate depth, had about a 15 minute bottom time, most of that time spent hovering and watching the other divers in my group deal with what they were doing.
B. I valiantly fought off a cold for a couple of days, and then I set off with the same operator for a wreck diving trip. I was joined by three very fine divers (and very fine humans, to boot), and I had an outstanding experience with them.
The difference can be explained by the fact that I had used ScubaBoard to find these people ahead of time. DiveDoggie had started a thread in this very forum asking where people were going for spring break, and I met Howard and his wife through that. I met Tim by probing the Florida Conch Divers forum. We thus formed a successful group that had a lot of fun, at least from my perspective.
It seems to me that this should be a common practice in this forum. If people are going to be going somewhere and are interested in joining with others, we should be using this forum in a routine way. Divedoggie's system worked just fine...I don't think it needs to be any more formal than that. I just suggest that we make regular threads of this kind so that we can keep in touch and possibly make connections when we travel to common destinations.
As an Oyster with a non-diving wife, I begin most of my dives trying to find a dive buddy among the strangers on a boat. In the past year or so, I have had a lot of miserable luck with that. The point of this post can be illustrated by contrasting two dives I had this week.
A. On Thursday, I went with a dive op in Florida and had yet another bad experience with the insta-buddy system--to summarize quickly, my second dive, to moderate depth, had about a 15 minute bottom time, most of that time spent hovering and watching the other divers in my group deal with what they were doing.
B. I valiantly fought off a cold for a couple of days, and then I set off with the same operator for a wreck diving trip. I was joined by three very fine divers (and very fine humans, to boot), and I had an outstanding experience with them.
The difference can be explained by the fact that I had used ScubaBoard to find these people ahead of time. DiveDoggie had started a thread in this very forum asking where people were going for spring break, and I met Howard and his wife through that. I met Tim by probing the Florida Conch Divers forum. We thus formed a successful group that had a lot of fun, at least from my perspective.
It seems to me that this should be a common practice in this forum. If people are going to be going somewhere and are interested in joining with others, we should be using this forum in a routine way. Divedoggie's system worked just fine...I don't think it needs to be any more formal than that. I just suggest that we make regular threads of this kind so that we can keep in touch and possibly make connections when we travel to common destinations.
