How do I keep my male dive buddy from taking over the dive?

[RBachman]

Release his weight belt.

 

[ShakaZulu]

Marry him...............

 

[Seabear70]

Make a small custom slate saying "You're doing it again!" then show him that when he's acting like an idiot.

 

[Kriterian]

This sounded like an ugly situation to begin with but people have livened it up with some great humor

I thought I'd throw out another possibility that I didn't see anyone else bring up. Have you thought that maybe he feels threatened by you towards his wife? Maybe all this over-posturing is him trying to become a "better" diver than you to impress his wife. Maybe he's jealous?

Just a suggestion but I definitely think communication is the best policy in any relationship, be it friend, lover or foe (or all three!)

 

[Philip E. Lomason]

Why not tell your insensitive buddy that you take turns planning and leading the dive. This way, he can do his race around the chosen dive spot and you can take your turn later. Your G/F can have her turn too.

I've been diving with my best friend and her S/O for more than two years now. We usually ended up diving as a trio without any problems. We checked each other's gear, planned out dives together, etc. We all got our rescue diver certs at about the same time. Diving together was really fun.

But now her S/O is working on his divemaster cert and has started taking over everything. He's deciding the dive plan (which ends up being like a class instead of relaxing and fun), insists on setting up our gear (as if we were students at the start of our first pool session), wants us to do skills like buddy breathing, mask removal, hovering and so forth on every dive, then swims as fast as he can from point a to point b, won't let us stop to look at anything (since we can't let him go on ahead by himself) and worst of all, spends the drive home criticizing our buoyancy, technique, breathing rate, etc.

Last week my friend and I were diving with our new dive computers for the first time. We ended up pausing in our travel across the lake a few times to practice reading the information and he immediately assumed we were "having a problem" and were about to go into full blown panic. Evey two minutes thereafter he'd be tugging on one or another of our fins and giving us the "Are you OK?" then when we did our ascent he thought we were having problems becuase we were ascending more than twice as slowly as he was (our new computers have much more conservative ascent rates programmed in them than his older computer does). When my girl friend and I paused at 10 feet he grabbed our BCs and hauled us up to the surface so fast that my computer went into violation mode.

I gave him hell for it, since he could have caused all of us to get DCS. But he hasn't changed his behavior. I've already mentioned this to his instructor but as far as I can tell the instructor hasn't said anything to him.

On Sunday we went to the lake to dive. He was assisting with a class so my girlfriend and I got to dive by ourselves. We took 40 minutes to cover the same area he makes us cover in 15 minutes. We found all sorts of intersting freshwater fish and other critters that we never had the chance to observe before. It was a wonderfully relaxing dive. But when we got out of the water he was mad as hell because we didn't wait for him to get done with the class so he could dive with us.

Does anyone have any advice on what I can do to prevent or stop this kind of behavior? Directly confronting him about the issue doesn't work and I don't really want to ditch him as a dive companion because then I'd not be able to dive with my girlfriend. Is this something he'll outgrow once he's completed his divemaster certification? Or am I stuck with a control freak dive buddy?

Christine :bfish:

 

[lamont]

If he really wants to be a good instructor he should be trying to fade into the background whenever possible instead of always trying to take the lead. Ideally he should be passing on any skills he's learning in his classes on dive planning onto the two of you, so that you're planning and executing the dives and he's just watching and maybe offering suggestions. That would be better for you two and better for his students -- he'd be building confidence in his students then instead of dependence.

Poor form following up to myself, but I wanted to add a few other thoughts that I had:

The first is that he shouldn't be treating you like students either. My point above was just that his behavior when applied to students isn't going to be helping them at all either. When he's diving with you, he needs to back off even more.

The second thought builds on that and is that he needs to back off and let other people choose their own style of diving. Being a DM isn't about getting everyone else to dive exactly like he's being trained to dive in his classes.

I also kind of wonder if his DM instructor isn't giving him some really bad advice and training... I've got this picture in my mind of an instructor passing along gems about how idiotic most divers are and how you need to do everything for them and control them and him soaking it all up...

Him freaking out over too *slow* of an ascent rate is really bizzare and the thing that makes me question his training. Although it may not have had anything to do with training and maybe he had poor gas management (perhaps due to hoovering caused by zipping around at mach 2?) and was nearly OOA and tried to hide that by claiming you were ascending "too slow"?

 

[zuzanne]

:whack: Maybe its Male Ego, or maybe he is feeling protective. Since he is going on with further training as a DM, maybe he feels he now has more technical knowledge than the two of you. Whatever it is it really needs to stop now before it gets to be a real problem for a student just learning to dive. A new diver who does not know that this is not the way its supposed to be done could very well end up being so turned off by him that they give up diving and thats just not right.

I suggest before you enter the water for your next dive, you get right in front of him and take him by his air hose and coldly and unemmontionally tell him right in his face that unless he backs off and allows you to dive in peace the way you used to do that you can and will destroy his air supply.

Zuzanne

 

[scubagirl15]

CKBonder,
How did you make out with this male buddy after all? Did he ease up on the dive god routine or did you drop him?

 

[alemaozinho]

give him the flag,catchbag,snare,polespear,ticklestick and a camera,if he refuses any of the items,then go back to plan two=stab him

 

[ckbonder]

CKBonder,
How did you make out with this male buddy after all? Did he ease up on the dive god routine or did you drop him?

Thanks to all the good advice, my dive buddy is being a buddy again. I had him sit next to me and read the comments and suggestions after I had a talk with him the week before we went to Florida. He is assisting at OW checkouts this weekend and is going to work on assisting ONLY when needed and work on confidence building.

We (my dive buddy, his S/O, and my 15 year old niece) went to the Florida Keys for 10 days (we finished our diving on Wednesday, the day before we got evacuated for Hurricane Charley) and he tried really hard to not take over all the dives. After one or two false starts he was back to beign the dive buddy I enjoy diving with. We each got a chance to plan four dives and had a blast.

His S/O and I are meeting him at the lake after the checkouts are finished to do some diving. It will be interesting to see if he can successfully switch fro m"teaching mode" to "buddy mode."

In any case things are a lot better than they were.

Thanks again, everyone!

Christine in Dayton, OH :bfish: