go over to him after the dive and offer a bit of mentoring ... but at least he was managing to maintain his depth.
I suppose the crux of my OP hovers right around this point and the "ego" point so many others have raised. I love it when people strive and learn and work to get better.
I'm nowhere near the diver I want to be and work on it as much as I can. I try to dive with my betters and learn everything they are willing to impart. But the fact is I do know quite a lot, some of it obvious, some of it esoteric. And I try to be as good a mentor to people who are looking for it as I can be to pay it all back.
What drives me daffy is when I try to politely and quietly offer advice to someone I just saw kick the crap out of a 300 year old coral formation and I get back the, "I've been diving in Indonesia and I have all this fancy gear that my instructor who knows everything sold me. Also, my mom thinks I'm handsome."
I should probably take a moment to point out that I techies aren't immune from my eye-rolling moments, though. Like the time I signaled to a diver on a DIR team (in proper GUE-approved hand signals) that their right post was bubbling; since I was in a single 80 and a shop BC at the time whatever nonsense I was talking was dismissed.
So perhaps ya'lls are right. It's not 80s divers that annoy me per se, it's the 80s divers who think they're just the damned bees knees.