Thanks for the specifics; very useful. Thing is, there is a wide range of dive experience competency between 'fresh out of OW, just a few warm, shallow Caribbean reef dives with professional dive guides monitoring you' on the one hand, and 'everybody that day trip was dive master or above.'
I'm an intermediate diver, somewhere in that wide range between, and your input suggests to me the following points to ponder:
1.) Diving out of Jupiter tends to be drift diving, boats aren't moored or anchored so you've no line to get down or back up, and the boat drifts along following divers. Viz. tends to be fairly good, but not up there with Bonaire, Cozumel, etc...
2.) The guy you're there to watch draw in the sharks jumps in & does not wait for you. There are other divers who'll also need to get off the boat.
3.) When I was in Jupiter, seems like the typical dive briefing tended to include 'it's 90 feet to the sand.' So unless you want to hover well up in the water column, I'm guessing most of the divers are roughly at a similar depth to Randy and each other.
4.) Non-technically trained divers have often been taught strongly to avoid going into deco. If some of the divers ran into deco., I'm guessing it might be tricky to avoid if you want to go up at the end of the dive with the group, or at least Randy.
5.) I'm guessing you'd better plan on you, or you & your buddy, going up alone! Since it is drift diving, and the surface likely wavy, I wonder how often it takes awhile to get found?
Having dove Jupiter
one trip with Jupiter Dive Center (which I really liked), then
one trip out of Morehead City, NC (with Olympus Dive Center), to get a feel for being in the water with substantial numbers of fairly big (sand tiger) sharks (not fed or baited, just handing out), I've often mulled over the possibility of heading back down to Jupiter and diving with Randy. I've explored
his website a number of times. While the site asks for 'good divers' (but
look at the bottom of this page to see how that's described), I don't think the level of 'what to expect disclosure' quite rises to the level of the info. you provided.
Thanks for the video (nice looking, by the way), and especially your diving workflow description of how the trip ran. If I ever go on a trip where having to head up alone ahead of the group to avoid deco. on a drift dive with a moving boat is a common occurrence, I'd like to know in advance. And I don't mean finding out during the dive briefing!
Richard.