The trouble with buddy diving

[drbill]

There are very few people I care to buddy up with (that is who are available to buddy up with). I buddy with people I know fairly well. We dive together often enough to know what to do in situations such as the one you described. Pick up buddies too often are a PITA (as I am to them, being a videographer) and I try to avoid that whenever possible.

My incident rate over some 48 years of diving shows I am 20X more likely to have a "dive threatening" incident when buddied up than when I dive solo.

As you mentioned, there are those you have developed excellent buddy training whether they be Unified Team Divers or DIR or whatever you wish to call them. Many rec divers make pretty poor buddies unless they have had enough experience (or wisdom) to know how to buddy up properly.

 

[b1gcountry]

I asked some guy what the intended dive plan was and he said "just follow videographer guy" !!! ***?

I asked videographer guy what the dive plan would be, and he replied "Just stick close to me, and when you get to 500psi let me know."

Yeah, that was probably a big clue right there that there wasn't a dive plan. Whenever someone mentions 500psi in a dive plan, I get leery... I tend to take charge and just lead the dive myself in these kind of situations, but that's just me...and I also do it for the other guy probably more than myself. I have typically had bad experiences with folks that plan dives like these. But whatever, you took care of yourself, and that's what's important.

The first time I dove with some good divers was really an eye-opening experience about what its like to dive with good buddies. Even the first time you dive together, you just know exactly what's going on with them, and it's almost as much freedom as solo diving, as funny as that may sound. Like Solo Diving with a buddy.

Tom

 

[newd34]

I happen to totally agree with your thinking. as a member of an underwater search and rescue unit we rely on alot of planning and team work. when we do a body recovery it is known well in advance who is doing what and when. Thats the way it should be when you dive with a buddy.
"Plan your dive and dive your plan" whether your with someone or not. I also happen to be an avid solo diver. the reason being is that I have had to many buddys just change there mind underwater and do the exact opposite of what the plan was. It just makes me mad. I have also encountered situations where we wind up doing a recovery because the dive buddy panicked when there buddy ran out of air. Its just sad.

 

[Stoo]

I tried the "club thing" about 30 years ago.... It was probably the defining moment in my dive career that caused me to start diving on my own. There was a constant mantra in the meetings that continued to the boats... buddy this, buddy that... but in reality, a "gang" fell off of the boat, and swam about in a state of chaos in what could only be described as a cluster f*#@!

What was especially amusing was the "post-dive debriefing" where the dive that was discussed wasn't the dive I was on... or anything even close to it! These guys were all quite convinced that they had just completed a finely executed plan to perfection!

That was 1974. The next week, I bought a manifold, a couple of steel 72s and another "Calypso" reg... and never looked back...

 

[Al Titude]

Waterpirate, Stoo, and everyone else, you are all more than welcome to come dive every Wednesday night with us up here in NorthWest Montana. We have a group we call "Dive and Dine". We meet at 6pm at a different lake each week, blow a tank of air and then go have food and beers together. It's kinda sponsored thru our LDS (PADI).

I must admit I was inititally not looking forward to having to get a new instabuddy each week (more about that later). But these folks are typical Montanians, not pushy at all. We discuss the dive how to get there, depths, features, maybe it's a wall, or a like last nights dive, an underwater forest in Lake McDonald Glacier National park, 20 yds off shore at 50ft. People are encourged to buddy up with someone. It's mostly for help in getting gear on and hiking to the dive spot, and keeping a head count for the dining afterword, as well as meeting new folks (the PADI thing ).

It's up to the folks that buddy what they plan and discuss. I myself always start by asking "Have you Solo dived?", their reaction to that question dictates what I discuss next... If they answer with the brainwashed, mindless, no independent thought "Oh you should never solo dive", I ask them if they wouoldn't mind budding up with someone else, I apologize but I am just not comfortable diving with them. To date no one here has answered like that, not even the owner of the LDS (Shh don't tell PADI). Hey, it's Montana, very independent folks here.

So based on that we discuss a dive plan, signals, bailout, who will lead, who's got the post dive beers in their car....and we have a good dive.

Anyone that buys into thte partyline that you should never solo dive, is not the person I want to be in the water with. That says to me this person doesn't think for themselves, so what's going to happen when something they have never run across before comes up at 60ft? They are going to panic. And I don't need that. I've been a certified LifeGuard for over 25 years, been doing wilderness Survivial Training almost as long, and the one thing I have noticed in all the bad situations, the folks that don't think for themselves are the ones that end up in really bad situtations, and panic.

Whewww.... So my point is, not ALL groups are bad to dive with....

 

[b1gcountry]

There's good divers that don't dive alone, and there's also idiots that do.

Tom

 

[nereas]

I have found that my best buddy is simply my X-Scooter DPV. It never swims away from me, it goes wherever I want it to go, and it never runs out of air.

I prefer to dive off a boat with about a dozen other divers, therefore I know the boat is there for me, but I prefer not to be buddied-up with anyone else. My twin tanks provide me with 3x enough nitrox for the first dive, and 2x enough for the second. Thus I am using rule of thirds on the first dive, and rule of halves on the second.

The captain of the local dive boat knows me well enough not to worry when I am out there. And occasionally he will ask me to buddy up with someone else who does not have but who wants a buddy. Whenever I have done that, I just play "mother goose" and watch over them on both dives. I will let them lead, and with my DPV it is quite easy for me to follow them. Dives like this mostly then become macro dives, peering into nooks and cavities, rather than covering a lot of ground with the DPV. That's fine also.

If there is one piece of gear that has enhanced my safety and fun, it is the X-Scooter DPV. In close 2nd place is the twin tanks, as well.

 

[Stoo]

I really need to quit my job so I can devote the proper amount of time to SB etc...

Someone up above mentioned that all things considered, they would rather dive with a buddy than solo... and I agree in some cases.

For example, I love diving with my g/f... oops, wife (just got married) when we are south. She is new to this (we met when she took a class from me many years ago) and it's great fun sharing the "experience" with a neophyte in much the same way it's great fun walking through the woods with a three-year old. "Everything" is new through their eyes and I find it rewarding to watch her grow and develop confidence. (I barely passed her on her OW course... but she was cute, so what the hell...)

My regular dive "buddy" up here is a guy I have been diving with for 25 years. He and both I dive "solo"... but in the same area at the same time. I think that this evolved partly because he lost one hand years ago, so I help to suit him up, then push him out of the boat. Twenty minutes later, I follow him in and somewhere alone the way we usually see one another... We nod, or "OK" one another and that's the extent of it.

If we suited up at the same time, we would likely dive together and it would be just fine, but this is how our style has evolved. (I will point out though that we only dive together perhaps 6 times a year...)

As an aside, yes, there are additional concerns with his solo diving with his missing hand, but he has only ever had one for the entire time he has been diving and it works fine for him. I have seen him blow a bag, run lines, use a Nikonos etc. with a minimum of fuss... 25 years ago, he and I "serviced" his free-flowing Cyclon 5000 reg while buddy breathing (pre-octopus days) under the ice in 100 feet of water, so that says says something about our comfort level together in the water... He'd make a terrific full-time buddy... except he smells bad and takes up too much space in the boat!

 

[Reg Braithwaite]

So the thing I don't understand here is the etiquette of the sub-forum. This is a "no trolling" zone, meaning we do not criticize the idea of solo diving, we merely discuss how best to go about it.

Does this thread qualify as "reverse trolling"?

 

[mtmcrae]

I dive both solo and with a buddy. But there is only one buddy that I will now dive with. For my first 100 dives, I did about 75 of them with my dive buddy Dave. As a pilot his work schedule often changes and he's not always free to dive on the weekends, while I always have the weekends off. So following the PADI rule, I chose to "find" a buddy on the weekends that he couldn't dive. In ALL, and I'm not joking, 25 or so dives done with other buddies, I did not have one single enjoyable dive. I've been diving with newbies, with experienced people, and even with people that claim to be diving for the last 25 years (and trust me, those were the worst buddies). I'm not trying to claim that I'm a better diver than those people, but Dave and I have gotten to a point where we were planning our dives on the ride up to the location and de-briefing on the way home. We plan who'd navigating, what drills we are going to practice, how long we're gonna dive, backup plan, etc. We enter the water at 3000psi and always exit at the same pressure, so there's rarely one of us that has to end the dive early.
After many miserable experiences, for the both of us, diving with "unfamiliar buddies", we both decided to try solo diving, for those days that one of us were off and the other wasn't. What we both do now is when we are diving as buddies, we dive as though we are solo, meaning we practice self-reliance, with respect to equipment, procedures, safety drills, etc. Both of us carry a 30 pony, even if we know it's gonna be a 30ft max dive. And we both have the same equipment configuration, like DIR, so we're able to use constructive criticism to make us better divers.
I must admit I prefer to dive with a buddy, because it's always nice to have somebody to share the dive with and talk about all the cool stuff you just saw. But for me, I've become a better solo diver by practicing those techniques even when diving with a buddy.