CRDiver:
Here's an excellent article from the AquaCORPS archives...
On Your Own: The Buddy System Rebutted
By Bob Halstead
Buddies are not essential for a safe dive.
Niether is an alternate or redundant air sourse, cutting tool, fins, mask or any number of other tools we use. So?
On the contrary, buddies often increase the risk of a dive, either directly through unpredictable or unreliable actions, or indirectly, through an unfounded belief that security is enhanced by numbers alone, regardless of the training or state of mind of the buddy.
Good description of a bad buddy. Don't dive with them,
In most instances, a competent solo diver would be much safer than the average buddy dive.
This bozo doesn't know my buddies. I'd like to him prove "most"
Most textbooks do not define the buddy system - an interesting point in itself.
Most scuba courses seem to do a poor job of teaching the buddy system.
I define it as the situation that occurs when two divers of similar interests and equal experience and ability share a dive, continuously monitoring each other throughout entry, the dive, and the exit, and remaining within such distance that they could render immediate assistance to each other if required.
Obviously, this definition represents the ideal, and upon honest examination its clear that it has little to do with the reality as practiced by most divers. The truth is that on most dives, the buddy system fails.
If it fails most of the time it's only due to a failure by agencies to teach it and a failure by divers to learn it. It works very well fo us.
Ive been an active diving instructor for 20 years, and a professional sport diver for 13 years; Ive made over 5,000 dives and have personally supervised - without serious incident - over 90,000 dives. During this time Ive seen buddies that were incompatible either through interest of ability; buddies that spent their dives looking for each other; divers dependant on their buddies; divers who claimed to be buddies on the boat, but who ignored each other in the water; buddies who failed to communicate; buddies who fought in the midst of a dive; and divers who failed to recognize distress in a buddy, let alone attempt to assist.
Wouldn't you think that such an experienced instructor would catch on here? This is how he taught them to do it.
This last situation brings up a vital point. The buddy system implies that divers will be able to recognize a problem with their buddy and do something about it. Most are never put to the test, but experience indicates that if they were, many would fail.
Who's experience? And why not test a divers ability to do this in their entry level training.
An analysis of diving fatalities in Australia and New Zealand over the past ten years found that 45% of the fatalities involved buddies who were separated by the fatal problem or who were separated after the problem commenced.
More evidence of bad buddies.
Another 14% stayed with the buddy, but the buddy died anyway. Just being together is not enough.
Ah but how many time did having a buddy help solve a problem or avoid it completely? or wasn't that counted? Counteing only the unsuccessfull attempts at applying the buddy system tells us nothing about all the successful attemts.
From these observations, Ive concluded that the buddy system is mostly mythical.
With all the divers this guy has trained I'd have to blame him, in part for that. He should dive with us sometime. We could show him how it works.
It is unreasonable, unworkable, unfathomable, and unnatural. Rarely - very rarely - I see a couple who buddy dive as the ideal. In my view, most diving today is, in fact, solo diving, even if the divers claim to be buddy diving. Unfortunately, because it is taboo, most divers have had no specific training to qualify them for such solo diving.
Since he notices that their buddy diving is so poor you'd think he'd recognize that they have no specific training for buddy diving either.
How did we get ourselves into this mess?
By telling divers to dive with a buddy but never showing them how or testing their abilioty to do so in training. Most instructors just have the group follow him then gives them a certification to go out and buddy dive. The problem is that he's only showed them how to and tested their ability to solo dive in a pack.
Unfortunately, few people defending the buddy system seem to address the critical point of whether it does, in fact, make diving safer as intended. Since the introduction of the buddy system 30 years ago, a large body of divers has developed who have made careers out of sport diving. These people must now look to their experience to decide whether or not the buddy system has worked, or whether it should be modified or even abandon.
Well I've helped many people under water. Everything from straping their tanks back on for them to giving them gas to breath to untangling them to arresting uncontroled ascents to simply pointing out things that may have become a big problem later. Let me tell you it was safer for all those divers that I was there and some of them wouldn't be here if I hadn't been.
By all means, if you enjoy diving alone then do it. However this kind of trip is misleading, incompetant, dangerous and just plain BS. This guy has to be the biggest idiot who ever possesed adequate smarts to learn to write.
The only justification is just because you want to. Why try to make up lies, excuses and use warped logic to comvince some one else that what your doing is some how smart or the safest way to do it.
I dive deep, in caves, in wrecks under ice and with long decompression obligations. None of which makes for the safest way in which to dive and I don't try to convince any one otherwise. I dive in a cave because I want to. As long as I'm going to do it I try to do it in the safest way possible.
If you want to solo dive...do it because you want to and do it in the safest way possible without trying to kid yourself into thinking it's the safest possible way to dive.
