Sounds like there were several problems.
First off, your goals for the dive and the goals of your buddies seem to have been quite different. It doesn't work well to team up people who don't have a similar vision of what the dive will be. Further, it doesn't sound as though there was much, if any, pre-dive discussion about who was going to do what, who was leading, and how the dive would proceed. Many of these sorts of problems can be avoided if these questions are answered before the divers get in the water.
Second, it takes discipline and good diving skills to keep a team of three together in good order in poor visibility. Strong dive lights help a great deal, but if you don't have them, you are going to have to stay close together, and identify a leader on whom the other two can orient. And everyone on the team has to be committed to keeping the team together.
Third, you ended up in deco. You didn't post your profile, but even if your computer was running much more conservative than anybody else's, it doesn't appear that you were monitoring yours. The Suunto behavior when you go into deco is to give you what is probably an excessive obligation for what you would have come up with if you had PLANNED a decompression dive. But the bottom line is that you shouldn't have ended up there, and by doing so and NOT knowing how much deco you actually owed and where it needed to be done, you created a situation which forced the fragmentation of your team.
If you are going to continue to do charter dives and wind up with instabuddies, it sounds as though you need to try to select buddies who are also photographers and sea life people, who want a slow dive and want to look at little stuff. You need to do a thorough pre-dive discussion of goals, plans and procedures, so that everybody is on the same page once you're in the water. And you need to be much more diligent in monitoring the status of your dive, so that you don't end up annoying your computer and incurring a deco obligation that leaves you in the water alone.
First off, your goals for the dive and the goals of your buddies seem to have been quite different. It doesn't work well to team up people who don't have a similar vision of what the dive will be. Further, it doesn't sound as though there was much, if any, pre-dive discussion about who was going to do what, who was leading, and how the dive would proceed. Many of these sorts of problems can be avoided if these questions are answered before the divers get in the water.
Second, it takes discipline and good diving skills to keep a team of three together in good order in poor visibility. Strong dive lights help a great deal, but if you don't have them, you are going to have to stay close together, and identify a leader on whom the other two can orient. And everyone on the team has to be committed to keeping the team together.
Third, you ended up in deco. You didn't post your profile, but even if your computer was running much more conservative than anybody else's, it doesn't appear that you were monitoring yours. The Suunto behavior when you go into deco is to give you what is probably an excessive obligation for what you would have come up with if you had PLANNED a decompression dive. But the bottom line is that you shouldn't have ended up there, and by doing so and NOT knowing how much deco you actually owed and where it needed to be done, you created a situation which forced the fragmentation of your team.
If you are going to continue to do charter dives and wind up with instabuddies, it sounds as though you need to try to select buddies who are also photographers and sea life people, who want a slow dive and want to look at little stuff. You need to do a thorough pre-dive discussion of goals, plans and procedures, so that everybody is on the same page once you're in the water. And you need to be much more diligent in monitoring the status of your dive, so that you don't end up annoying your computer and incurring a deco obligation that leaves you in the water alone.
