Personal Limits to Solo Diving

[Wibble]

In the States it is common to show a cert card if you are diving with a dive op (established business).

There seems to be an industry wide standard in our greater area for the dive op to ask:

• for a cert card,
• when your last dive was,
• and sometimes they ask how many dives you have performed.

For shore diving or diving that is independent of a dive op, you are free to dive at will with no "papers". Getting a gas fill is usually allowed with a judgement-call from the dive op. They can figure out if you are getting a fill for diving or for paint ball. I have not been asked for a Nitrox card in years.

TBH I think it's also that diving is possibly more common in the US -- you have warm-water holiday locations where people catch the diving bug. That and the litigious culture of ambulance-chasing lawyers, one can see why there's a need for cards. For the UK, diving isn't that common mainly due to the cold and we've the NHS (National Health Service) which will fix you plus the RNLI (lifeboats) and coast guard helicopters to get you to a chamber quickly and for free. Don't even need insurance, except for going abroad.

 

[agilis]

Sounds bad. I Hope you told them with plenty of time to find a new buddy, because most divers (even here in New England) are not trained, equipped, or interested in solo.

Question to the hive mind: What are your thoughts on solo diving from a boat without surface support - as in heading out alone and leaving the boat anchored unattended while diving? Seems that some people do it without a second thought while others treat it as incredibly dangerous.

I once dived with a small one-man operation in a remote Caribbean area. The operator got his tanks filled every few days from a club on the other side of the island. Actually, it was not completely one-man, because the operator paid a kid to sit in the small boat when he and the two or three customers would dive on the reef. Getting back into the boat was the hardest part of the dive. One day I was the only customer, so just the two of us headed out, perhaps two miles from shore. When we surfaced, we saw that the boat had drifted away, and was still moving with the breeze away from us, further off shore.

We looked at the boat, then at the distant shore, then at each other. "Can you swim?", he asked. Yes, no problem, I answered. "Well, I can't" he said. We took off our gear, inflated our horse collars making a raft of sorts, and began the long swim back. All in all, it was a glorious day, one I'd happily repeat.

 

[SlugLife]

All dives are solo dives. With the exception of raw novices, you should never** rely on your buddy's resources to get you to the surface. You must be self reliant and take responsibility for your own safety.


** Exceptions for extreme dives with experienced divers with practiced team skills, e.g. v.deep with team bailout

Nice to say but if that were really what should be agreed to then there wouldn’t be much of a scubaboard membership.

Why? Because people would die? Or diving would be too complicated for beginners?

I have to agree with Wibble. Perhaps he should have bolded the word "rely" as well.

Obviously, divers can and should assist eachother including sharing air, cutting entanglements, and more. However, I would absolutely never intentionally rely on a dive-buddy, and ensure my dive planning and equipment match such that I could fairly reliably get myself out of most situations with my own equipment and training. The two main scenarios you should be prepared for (especially with an insta-buddy) is (1) your dive-buddy is unavailable, perhaps due to being distracted or swimming off or (2) your dive-buddy has a similar problem, such as not monitoring their own air. Relying on your buddy's resources is a great way to end up with two dead divers, in the unfortunate incident both divers end up relying on the other buddy's resources at the same time.

I'm not a cave-diver, but from listening to other cave-divers: Cave-diving teams generally do dive-planning and equip themselves, such that at any point in the dive, they have fully redundant resources on themselves, and will thumb the dive if any diver no longer has that redundancy. They of course practice all kinds of buddy-skills including air-share and leading a maskless buddy, and would absolutely aid eachother in emergency and non-emergency issues.

In the States it is common to show a cert card if you are diving with a dive op (established business).

There seems to be an industry wide standard in our greater area for the dive op to ask:

• for a cert card,
• when your last dive was,
• and sometimes they ask how many dives you have performed.

For shore diving or diving that is independent of a dive op, you are free to dive at will with no "papers". Getting a gas fill is usually allowed with a judgement-call from the dive op. They can figure out if you are getting a fill for diving or for paint ball. I have not been asked for a Nitrox card in years.

cheers,
m

That's curious. In my area, I've only ever been asked for a cert-card, but never a dive-log or other info. There was another recent thread where people asked whether or not anyone has asked to see your dive-log.

 

[markmud]

That's curious. In my area, I've only ever been asked for a cert-card, but never a dive-log or other info. There was another recent thread where people asked whether or not anyone has asked to see your dive-log.

Hmmm....

I did not mention in my post that anyone has ever asked to inspect my logbook...did I?

I qualified my statements very well. Dive ops do ask for the things I listed. Especially if you are diving off their boat.

People who have their certs on file and who are otherwise well known by dive ops don't get "carded".

Otherwise, it is the Wild, Wild West out there!

cheers,
m

 

[A.Lwin]

Currently my personal limit to solo diving is:
1. No deeper than 20m, I dive with a manifold D12
2. Only in a location I know very well
3. Only if the weather and water conditions are good
4. Only if my mind is clear and free of all stress factors and distractions

 

[scubadada]

Currently my personal limit to solo diving is:
1. No deeper than 20m, I dive with a manifold D12
2. Only in a location I know very well
3. Only if the weather and water conditions are good
4. Only if my mind is clear and free of all stress factors and distractions

Seems like the purpose of much of my solo diving is to relieve me of life's stress factors. It works quite well

 

[SlugLife]

Currently my personal limit to solo diving is:
1. No deeper than 20m, I dive with a manifold D12
2. Only in a location I know very well
3. Only if the weather and water conditions are good
4. Only if my mind is clear and free of all stress factors and distractions

That's a good list. Mine is similar:

1. Max 80ft / 25m (in "perfect" conditions) More commonly 60ft.
2. Redundant air & other redundancy.
3. Familiarity with equipment & relevant skills.
4. Familiarity/ability/training/experience to handle environment, challenges, and stress-factors.

I'll still dive solo, even failing some of the above, but with additional precautions. For example, if equipment-testing or trying something new (like sidemount), I may start with surface-practice, then at 15ft, then 30ft, etc. If a new environment environment, I might limit to 50ft or less. If it's bad visibility, 60-80ft is totally fine, because that's my "normal" dive conditions.

On an ocean-dive recently, due to unfamiliarity with environment, currents, extreme cold, small pony-bottle, etc. I opted out of solo-diving and stuck close to my dive-buddy. I expect my "need" for a buddy was somewhere in the 0.1% to 0.5% range (1/1000 to 1/200 dives), but which is above my solo-threshold. At 1% or higher, I'd skip the dive.

 

[OTF]

I mentioned my rather conservative personally imposed solo limits earlier in the thread and have generally stuck to them.

However, the other day I totally blew those limits doing a 90' solo dive to deal with a f'd anchor.

 

[A.Lwin]

Seems like the purpose of much of my solo diving is to relieve me of life's stress factors. It works quite well

I meant more like don’t dive if you’re having a bad day, or you’re not sure if you’re in the right mood for it. I also dive to get away from people and stress.

That's a good list. Mine is similar:

1. Max 80ft / 25m (in "perfect" conditions) More commonly 60ft.
2. Redundant air & other redundancy.
3. Familiarity with equipment & relevant skills.
4. Familiarity/ability/training/experience to handle environment, challenges, and stress-factors.

I'll still dive solo, even failing some of the above, but with additional precautions. For example, if equipment-testing or trying something new (like sidemount), I may start with surface-practice, then at 15ft, then 30ft, etc. If a new environment environment, I might limit to 50ft or less. If it's bad visibility, 60-80ft is totally fine, because that's my "normal" dive conditions.

On an ocean-dive recently, due to unfamiliarity with environment, currents, extreme cold, small pony-bottle, etc. I opted out of solo-diving and stuck close to my dive-buddy. I expect my "need" for a buddy was somewhere in the 0.1% to 0.5% range (1/1000 to 1/200 dives), but which is above my solo-threshold. At 1% or higher, I'd skip the dive.

I only listed the items that were my personal limits, if I have to mention other general requirements to make solo diving safe, the list would be longer.

 

[AfterDark]

I've never had any limits on my solo diving. As I've gotten older I have self-imposed restrictions on diving in general, none having to do with depth. For many many years I've treated every dive like a solo dive, buddied up or not. To me safe diving is all about self-reliance.