I feel a bit guilty....would you?

[H2Andy]

Kim is a man...

all the girls he knows says he's got it coming,
but he gets it while he can

 

[Diver Dennis]

So true Andy...

 

[Kim]

Kim is a man...

Was last time I looked..... :14:

 

[ItsBruce]

I consider the dive guide to be in charge of the dive. Otherwise, he would not be the dive guide.

 

[Kim]

I consider the dive guide to be in charge of the dive. Otherwise, he would not be the dive guide.

Actually that's not strictly true. The guide is there if you want him. It was made perfectly clear in our briefings that if a buddy pair wanted to head off in a different direction they were perfectly at liberty to do so - as long as they kept to the max depth/max time limits and used their safety sausage to ascend. Trained divers don't need a 'boss' really (although I admit I called him that erroneously earlier in the thread) - they are perfectly capable of doing their own dive without supervision (or should be!)

However - when I go somewhere like the Similans I normally stick with the guide as he/she knows the sites and often where the 'good stuff' is lurking!

 

[D_B]

Kim .. I would have done what you did .. felt as you do about it ... and made the same decision about what to do in the future if it happens again, even if it's only for my own piece of mind and no other reason

DB

 

[Jason Ooi]

KIM, I been in this situation before never felt guilty about having a buddy ascend solo in shallow water.

 

[Charlie59]

You are a horrible person and diver! I hope you went to church after the dive trip and fessed up quickly. OH ALRIGHT, I would have done the same thing. If someone has the guts to disassemble his reg underwater, he needs to surface on his own.

When an experienced diver who has been under the boat for a short period only has to surface and that person in not in distress, you put them at little risk of bad stuff. If his octo had failed, he would have surfaced a little faster.

My guess is that this guy dives solo to set up the moorings or to perform other functions on the boat and does well.

The real issue would have been a less experienced partner who was another rec diver and not a pro. In that case your angst would be well placed.

Again, in this situation, no worries.

 

[Charlie59]

DM, that's the guy payed to look interested while you dive.

 

[Cave Diver]

Well Kim you feel guilty probably because you know you knew you should have stayed with him and ascended, but his insistance threw you off your game.

You've no doubt heard many of the accidents that started........."We left him to ascend alone...........found dead on the surface a short time later......."

You know it's a no-brainer and I'm sure you'll never do that again.

As has been said before, you're either committed to "team" or you're not. There's little middle ground here.

There's not much he's going to do to physically stop you from ascending with him. And if it happened to him again, maybe he would recall what you did with him and choose to make a similar choice, the safest one. Do what you know is right and to hell with what ANYONE says differently. He was obviously wrong here. Comfort makes one complacent, I think we all know that.

If he felt bad enough to wreck your dive........I like the beer idea.

I'm going to be one of the few that agrees with this take on things because of some recent events.

I dive almost exclusively with buddies who are extremely competent, experienced and comfortable in the water. 4 of them have overhead environment training and 3 of them are also instructors.

There have been several instances where one of us has been in close proximity to the boat or shore and has made the decision to split from the group and ascend early.

We've had a dive where one person racked up considerable more deco time than the rest of us so he spent an extra 5-10 minutes at the 15' stop while everyone else got back on the boat. No big deal.

More recently we've had a dive trip where everything went smoothly until our 20' stop. One buddy reached over to close the shoulder dump on his NEW drysuit and it came off in his hand, flooding the suit. Another buddy had a regulator that started breathing wet so he switched to backup reg and discoverd a tear in the mouthpiece on his primary.

No big deal. Experienced divers, they handled them with no problem. But some things got me thinking recently. Most car accidents occur close to home because people get complacent in familiar surroundings. Why shouldn't dive accidents have similar occurences.

End of the dive, the hard part is over. You're within reach of the surface, relaxed, doing deco, complacency sets in. Suddenly someone has a problem, their buddy has already ascended and things escalate. Now a chain of events is started that has the potential for a bad outcome.

Yeah, we've done the "competent buddy surfaces alone" thing, but I'm seriously reconsidering that stance and doubt it will happen in the future.

We enter together, we exit together, 'nuff said.