Hank49
Contributor
This never occurred to me until this morning. When you take an open water course the buddy system is stressed from lesson 1, all through the course. You do buddy checks on all dives, buddy awareness, to a point, on all dives etc etc. But the instructor, even on the AOW DEEP dive, has no required or assigned buddy. And divemasters working in resorts routinely take down 4 or 6 or 8 divers paired up in buddy teams but the DM is basically solo. I did it myself. You brief the divers, assign or become aware of buddy teams, go down and show them around on a tour of the site. Who was my buddy? No one. I never realized that when I reached this level of training that my gear became infallible and I was kind of like "Superdiver", who would never experience troubles or need a buddy. I went through my instructor manual this morning and could find nothing about maklng sure I had a buddy on all dives during a course to at least demonstrate to students that I practice what I preach.