If you have to ask, you're not ready to solo......?

[finley]

I have read through this board and all the banter on "if they ask" or if they"don't bother to ask" and have to say I am kind of disappoited that no one expressly stated THE SKILLS needed to dive solo ( come on Wlater) but just referred to "an advanced skill level". This diver has 5 dives....no way should this person be doing solo dives...I am not an instructor or master but I pay enough attention to know theat it would require extra prepartion of gear, EXCELLENT navigational skills and a great deal of time /eperience resolving situations that could easily become crisis situations. I was hoping that someone would just lay out the skills themselves. Since my navigational skills (although great on land) are lacking underwater..I'll stick with divemasters, instructors and my more advanced buddies.

 

[UP4AIR]

There are some excellant points here being made by all. I have just one thought for all to ponder.

If you ain't diving like you are depending on YOU to save your backside....then perhaps you should re-address your methods/skills. When you get in the water, have a plan, dive that plan, and have YOUR OWN contingencies when that plan goes to pieces. Isn't this striking similar to solo?

Unless the buddy you are diving with is armlengths away when the "o" ring on the primary goes, and be honest, they never are ; you are going to be in a world of ----!

I dive with a buddy....I enjoy it more that way....but I dive in support of myself...and never rely on my buddy to get me out of a jam......strikingly similar to solo diving don't you think?

Just a thought

 

[Vayu]

Unless the buddy you are diving with is armlengths away when the "o" ring on the primary goes, and be honest, they never are ; you are going to be in a world of ----!

Guess that 25m underwater swim in OW was just for show? Holding breath and going for your buddy is alot preferable to making an emergency swimming ascent. Alot of people are afraid they will run out of breath and not be able to purge the second stage of their buddies regulator. This is where those regulator clearing techniques such as the purge button and the jaw jiggle come in handy.

I don't solo dive but i'm not going to argue with the people here who do, so i'll refrain from posting further in this thread.

 

[Puffer Fish]

There are some excellant points here being made by all. I have just one thought for all to ponder.

If you ain't diving like you are depending on YOU to save your backside....then perhaps you should re-address your methods/skills. When you get in the water, have a plan, dive that plan, and have YOUR OWN contingencies when that plan goes to pieces. Isn't this striking similar to solo?

Unless the buddy you are diving with is armlengths away when the "o" ring on the primary goes, and be honest, they never are ; you are going to be in a world of ----!

I dive with a buddy....I enjoy it more that way....but I dive in support of myself...and never rely on my buddy to get me out of a jam......strikingly similar to solo diving don't you think?

Just a thought

I believe you have it correct.

But so does Vayu - it is safer to have a buddy (if the buddy can actually help). Trouble is, if you are in 10 meters of water, and your buddy is 20 meters away, going up is safer. In 30 meters of water, with a buddy 10 meters away, go for the buddy.

Finley would like a check list of skills - but skills depend on the area and the conditions. What might be safe in one place is not safe in another. If one needs someone to tell them if they can dive solo, the answer for them is NO. If you need a checklist, another "NO"

I know people that dive an area so much, that they know every rock, so in that case, navigation is meaningless. They might dive solo there, but not in other places.

I, and most people I know, do not like solo diving, not because of the danger, but because diving tends to be almost as much social as personal. Solo divers are, for the most part, mission orientated people, where that is not an issue. Even when you can safely solo, you may never do it, because you like diving with people or feel uncomfortable diving by yourself.

 

[Puffer Fish]

Guess that 25m underwater swim in OW was just for show? Holding breath and going for your buddy is alot preferable to making an emergency swimming ascent. Alot of people are afraid they will run out of breath and not be able to purge the second stage of their buddies regulator. This is where those regulator clearing techniques such as the purge button and the jaw jiggle come in handy.

I don't solo dive but i'm not going to argue with the people here who do, so i'll refrain from posting further in this thread.

What if you buddy does not have a octo?- what if your buddy has one, but you don't know if it works? Have you practiced buddy breathing with this "buddy"?

Note: I dive a lot with my wife, and I know her equipment works, as she does mine, but on any trip to some distant location, just watch how seldom anyone every breaths through another persons reg, or tests anything before a dive. Pretty much, it is ready? Get in the water! Which is solo diving with a group.

I would think that most people with more than 500 dives know how a purge works and are not worried about whether it works or not (and anyone that is comfortable in the water, most likely does not even need to use it, if they had to).

 

[ataman]

A week or two ago i really wanted to dive the next morning, could not find a buddy and decided to do a solo dive. I had about 120 dives and i am very confident in my skills. I have been in quite harsh conditions and i have handled them properly. So i woke up, went for a dive. It was just awesome, maybe went little deeper than i should have. but generally it was great not to worry about anyone, nice and fast.

After question started coming up in to my, specially because i am a PADI DM. If i have told this other people how would they react? Would i get in trouble? Specially after i have done a dive to 147ft ( which is ok for me), i got in so much trouble from the shop manager. I just did not know how people would react. Now you might say why do you care? I do because i want become and instructor and keep going all the way. I do not want people to look at me like i am this crazy person. And that is probably the only reason why i want to take the course so i can say i am certified.

So after all these taought i asked on a the solo diver forum. I got the exact same reaction, if you ask you are not ready. People did not know i have already dove solo and was questioning if i have done something wrong that would make look like a "bad diver" again why do i care? because i want a career in diving....

 

[Gary D.]

Speaking of folks with lots more experience than me.............when are you coming back for a visit? You are missed!

Thanks Walter, I miss the old crew. A buddy and I might be down within the next year.

Gary, I also believe someone can be ready to solo and make lots, even hundreds of solo dives then come to a personal crisis and no longer be someone who should solo. That condition can be as passing phase or permanent.

Been there and will be there again.

Just because someone is a "SOLO DIVER", does not mean they are always one on every dive. As one's frame of mind changes so does their diving ability and their ability to dive solo.

Gary D.

 

[MikeFerrara]

If you are an instructor, you are solo diving almost all the time (your buddy is not going to be of much help).

We hear this all the time and it might be true for some instructors but it wasn't true for me when I was teaching.

Training dives were conducted one of two ways. Either I was buddied with an assistant and our objective for the dive was to conduct a training dive...approached as any other task oriented dive...or I was buddied with a student. The student has already demonsted a level of mastery in all skills including assisting a buddy appropriate for the level of diving being done. As an instructor, if I didn't feel a student was able to function as a buddy they'd still be in the pool. Why shouldn't I expect a student to demonstrate the actual application of a skill that's a prereq to the OW dive being conducted? In either case, I had an appropriate level of team support for the dive being conducted.

I'm not just talking theory but rather something that's been tested and proven more than once. between myself and training assistants we've had a number of issues during training dives ranging free flowing bc inflators, one inflator hose that just plain came apart (a poor design that we don't use any more), free flowing regs and probably some things that I've forgotten. In each case, even though no help was actally required, that instructor or assistants buddy, whether another instructor or a student, acted correctly and was prepared to do whever was needed.

The training dives themselves ranged from entry level training dives to entry level technical training dives. Team/buddy diving is what we were teaching and team diving is what we were doing...all of us.

Even though your point is often used in pro-solo arguements presented by the likes of Sd magazine while pushing SDI classes, it just shouldn't be true and often isn't.

If you do not prepare yourself as if you were a solo diver, you are making a big mistake.

Preparing to be self sufficient and capable of self rescue is a good idea for every dive but that's not, IMO, the same as preparing for a solo dive when you're conducting a team dive.

 

[grazie42]

I don´t know you ataman, what I know about you is (from your posting):
-You have 120 dives in 4 years, in various conditions, and are confident in your skills.
-You are a PADI DM
-You dove to 147ft, solo (?)
-You soloed, but went deeper than your plan, and don´t see that as a problem.

I sympathize with your shop manager and understand how he felt, from a liability perspective if nothing else. What in your DM training prepared you for 147ft dives? It seems "plan your dive, dive your plan" wasn´t stressed enough. We can all play the numbers game with dives and at what number a diver is "ready", from what you´ve posted I can only say that it is my firm belief that you aren´t. With OW, AOW, Rescue and DM-training, how many "real" dives have you actually made with just you and a buddy?

I propably sugarcoated too much...At this point I think you should be more worried about surviving your dives than what other people think about them afterwards...I seriously question whether you should dive unsupervised, let alone be entrusted with the care of new divers lives...

You and a bunch of other people propably think I´m overreacting, feel free, as always your mileage may vary...

 

[MikeFerrara]

In answer to the original topic...sort of...

There have always been solo divers and lots of them including but not limited to photographers, hunters and lots of technical diving applications like sump diving. I think there's a couple of reasons that we see more people asking permission. One is that we have folks selling solo diving now like SD magazine and SDI. Another might be the increased media through which to ask...like this board for example.

As poorly as team diving is traditionally taught, I even think that solo diving has been a natural progression because most divers are solo diving from day one, though it takes them a while to realize it. I almost think that it's all the divers who have been so poorly taught to team dive who are the least able to really to compare the advatages/risks of team diving to those of solo diving regardless of the number of dives that they have. A million poorly done dives may qualify as some kind of experience but I don't know haw many decissions should be based on that experience. They just don't have an adequate basis of comparison.

My first solo dive was my first dive ever. Aside from that, many of my first post cert dives were solo. Often times, I and a buddy were seperated during descent in marginal vis because we were never taught to control a descent well enough to stay together. We were perfectly happy with dropping down and then locating eachother. Sometimes we could and sometimes we couldn't. In that regard, we were taught to solo dive from OW class on and that's what we were doing. It wasn't until sometime later that we actually learned something about team diving.

There is solo diving in reasonable proximity to others, team diving and real solo diving. I don't think that mainstream dive training or the recreational community as a whole does a very good job of distinguishing between them or that they really understand the difference. If you're going to team dive the way you were most likely taught in class you might be just as well off to just quit fooling yourself and just go solo diving.