gj62
Contributor
I guess if you have a small comfort zone, you need to stay safely within it.MHK:Many were solo lobster hunting, while other's were bragging about going to 165' on air, while yet some other's decided that diving without a BC is the manly thing to do. In short, this is a fairly representative sample of a typical open boat in So Cal. All of those idea's described above are ideas that I have rejected in the interest of increasing my safety margins. Moreover, I used to deep air, solo dive all the time so in essence I have used the "situation at hand" and learned from my previous mistakes. In my view, those ideas increase risk, increase stress and reduce safety and thus by extension reduce the amount of fun that I have diving, so why would I dive with any of those divers to learn from them?
The majority of my diving these days is done ad-hoc on boats, including CA (used to lead trips on Conception/Truth quite often). While I've certainly run across the types of divers you describe above (including an odd bird that was burying his guage to get the deepest reading), I've never felt that this was a great threat to my personal safety (especially someone else soloing), except that I share the planet with these fools. I've certainly declined to buddy again with certain folks, mainly due to personality, more than technique differences.
Lastly, most of these folks described above were ignoring whatever training/education they had in order to do what they wanted - that's not a good thing whether you are PADI, GUE, etc...
My guess is that there are a number of divers on this board who are not DIR with whom I think you'd be comfortable and would not unduly create stress in your dive. It would be a shame if you didn't dive with them because they don't use a long hose on a reef dive...