dumpsterDiver
Banned
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I do technical and cave diving, which is arguably higher risk than simple recreational diving. We plan for ONE major failure. Team separation is a major failure -- once you are separated and unable to regroup, your only job is terminating the dive. The likelihood of a catastrophic equipment failure leaving you out of gas on precisely the dive where you have experienced a team breakdown is very, very low. If you have done your gas planning correctly, you have a reserve in your tank for the event of your buddy having a gas failure, so even if the separation makes you anxious and increases your consumption rate, you have a lot of gas you can use before you are going to be low.
I could posit a dive where you have a team separation but for some reason, you cannot surface and end the dive (a long way offshore, or in an area with a lot of boat traffic) and you have to spend a long time underwater alone to get home. My immediate reaction is that that isn't a single tank dive; my solution would be doubles, but yours might be a slung bottle. You can ask questions about whether such a dive is really a good idea in the first place, and you can also say that, if executing such a dive, team cohesion ought to be a VERY high priority.
I often get the feeling that I live in a different world from a lot of other divers, and maybe I do. I've had eight years of living in a diving community where diving as a team is a core value. We do a lot of training and a lot of practice to make sure we keep our situational awareness high, with a strong focus on remaining aware of one another and staying in communication. As a result, team separations are VERY, VERY rare, and usually brief. I guess the fact that I know this is possible does shape my advice -- as my dear friend HBDiveGirl says, "Dive to stay found," and you won't be DEALING with separations often enough to make carrying another piece of equipment to deal with them a necessity.
n.
I think this is very important. You ARE diving in a different world than most recreational divers. You have different training, different buddies, different objectives, different priorities and you view the buddy team as central to the whole dive experience.
The problem, as I see it, is that most (basic) dive training is really NOT good. Their buddy skills are NOT good, the priority of maintaining "tight" buddy team is low, their experience is vastly inferior, their situational awareness and ability to monitor their air reserves (on an almost intuitive basis) is just "not here", and their over all comfort and ability to correctly handle a potential OOA emergency is probably vastly different than yours and your team. In fact "normal" divers don't HAVE teams! They have buddies that get assigned to them in unfamiliar situations.
Combining all these differences leads me to conclude that the marginal utility of a pony bottle would be less to your team members than to a typical recreational diver. You may think that the solution is for them to be more like you (I.e., diving in a real team)..while I think a more practical solution for many of these people is to simply get a reasonably sized redundant system, certainly it is easier to attain than 8 years of diving experience with team-oriented "professionals".