It happens quite often while diving in Caribbean, mostly on cattle boats with big mixed group of peoples. You jump in a water, start diving and let's say you see a nice swim through area worth of good photo shot or video. You stop, aim and right before you get a chance to take a picture, sudden stream of bubbles starts raising up right in front of your camera and even worse you camera gets kicked up by fellow diver trying to squeeze into this swim through area below you. Or even better your camera is being kicked down from the above and you get fin kick in you mask by another fellow diver squeezing himself above. What the..? Can this people wait 30 sec? Do they have any respect for fellow divers and for god's sake do they even think about unsafe conditions they create? On my last dive, I even experienced horror story. Here is the guy who just taken a picture of something at the bottom and started swimming away. My wife (who is not very expririenced diver) slowly starts swimming to the same spot intrigued to see what is in there. Suddenly guy with the camera realizes that he needs another shot, turns around and swims back to the spot like his life depends on this. Obviously, he collides with my wife and poor girl immediately gets into uncontrolled ascent. Thankfully, I grabbed her and we are all fine. I was seriously condisidering punching this quy in the face but was able to control myself. Have you guys seen such selfish behavior and what the best way to handle it?
Here's a story about diver behavior.
During a recent trip, I was photographing my daughter for a story she was writing. Sammi was 13 at the time and she is a Jr. AOW diver. She is also an excellent diver. We were shooting photos in a coral chimney. Her buoyancy is pretty near perfect and the shoot was going well. We wrap things up, which took about ten minutes, and I give her the prearranged exit signal. We had a dive master with us who was the guide.
As we are making our way out of an opening at about 75 fsw, suddenly a diver drops on top of Sammi and literally sharts shaking her, essentially trying to man handle her out of the way. (She later told me she thought it was me trying to get her attention until she realized it was someone else.)
This particular chimney drops to about 140 fsw, where it opens up on a wall that goes deeper.
The idiot finally lets go of Sam and shoots to the bottom and disappears. I mean, this guy ws literally finning as fast as he could to to the bottom --clearly he wanted to make the 'deep dive' on the trip and didn't care who was in the way.
Sam was not flustered and watched the moron swim away; then she casually swam out of the chimney and we finished the dive. I wanted to go after the jerk, but obviously that was not an option.
Back on the boat, this guy who had been, shall we say, problematic during each day of diving walks over and says something about Sammi getting in his way and "she panicked." Incredibly he was indicating that he somehow saved her from her panic. (He was the guy who always had an equipment problem, couldn't find has mask as everyone was about to go in the water, had a free-flowing reg about once a dive --you know this guy, right?)
Sam looked at the idiot and said something like, "Yeah, right, I'm the one who was out of control." She then rolled her eyes and walked away. (Thirteen year olds can be lethal, you know.)
The guy looks at me and says, "she panicked." I suggested that he was mistaken, and asked exactly what he was doing dropping into a chimney at that speed when clearly there were divers in there --unless he didn't notice the bubbles coming up not to mention the very big strobes flashing off?
He mumbled something and walked away.
Now, you have to know my daughter. She made sure everyone on the boat and pretty much everyone at the resort knew about this moron's behavior. I personally don't condone that sort of thing, of course.
Sadly, there are a lot of divers who are not only inconsiderate; they have zero situational awareness and are potentially dangerous. My suggestion, come with a loaded 13 year old for self defense.
Jeff