To Buddy or not to Buddy?

[Ana]

So, I have a question for those of you who have been negative about buddies.

If you had a buddy who a) had good equipment that was well-maintained; b) had strong personal diving skills; c) helped create -- and stuck to -- an acceptable dive plan; d) managed his gas, and e) was where you expected him to be every time you looked up -- would it change your opinion of buddy diving?

My husband is a magnificent diver. Anytime we have additional people coming along in the boat he and I enter the water together but even when we surface together, our dive doesn't qualify as a buddy dive.
-Most of the times we are far apart. I have the tendency to look at the bottom looking for molluscs, shells and flounder. He looks on the water column and at the edge of visibility for bigger creatures.
-It is rare that I look up and know where he is, unless we are diving on better than usual vis. Chances are I could find him, if I actively engage in search for him but it would take some time.
-Diving new places we do cross paths often, but again I'm not sure what we do can be considered buddy diving.
-As the years have gone by, many times we surface together but is mostly from diving familiar sites. On our own way we are both very methodical in the way we approach the dive. Unless I'm cold and I cut the dive short, or there is something out of ordinary that has me playing or admiring that will have me to the very edge of my limits, I keep my dives to 1 hour.
-That's my routine, so it isn't difficult to match me at the anchor line, again part of my procedure is to take my sweet long time to go up the line, because I consider it part of the dive, even longer if I'm coming up a established mooring line instead of our clean anchor line.


I've also been in the water with other magnificent divers, some of them from this board.
I have a blast with the ones that agree to be same ocean divers, we stay within visual contact most of the time. With the ones that their buddy check actually requires touching my gear I don't even hit the water together.
As far as I'm concerned, if you can't see that I don't have ditchable weights and that my spare 2nd stage is right by my side chances are you are going to be a PITA during the dive, not taking away from their knowledge but their way doesn't match mine. My gear is as basic as it gets: mask, fins, clean backplate with a small wing, 1 tank, 1 first stage, 2 seconds, a knife and a pocket. Inside the pocket there is a light and a bag. It is no one business what is inside the pocket and if they need to touch what is in front of their eyes, chances are they will be chatty during the dive, I don't care to interact with that type of person.

 

[TMHeimer]

I had a regular buddy for about 3 years. We dived the deeper shore dives here and occasionally from his boat. The logistics of where we each lived in relation to the dive sites fit perfectly. His location even aided me with getting tank fills. He's pretty much out of diving now. I would prefer to find another like him to diving solo, particularly since I limit solo shore dives to 30' or less. But, that's the way it is right now. As far as charters go, I wouldn't purposely go solo and would always take my chances with a buddy given the choice of that vs. solo. Then come my thoughts on whether to take the pony or not.

 

[Ana]

Sometimes I think what we write in threads like this is completely at cross-purposes, because our experiences are so different.

This is probably a huge reason why some dive the way they do. Not only the situation they encounter presently but also their beginnings.

It always remind me of long division. The way I learned in Spain to divide XYZ by ab requires to set it just like that "XYZ / ab" with the quotient being place one by one under the ab, for what I've seen in the states the quotient goes under the XYZ. That confuses the heck out of me, and as an engineer I can do math plenty well. I can get to the same result but bothers me going that way.

Similar with the diving, having someone heavily involved in my diving annoys me. I started diving by myself, no one "drilled" in my head that I had to have a buddy. I then worked underwater, all my support was topside. For the longest time my dives were either by myself or with people that didn't care for buddies.
Risks? yes of course they are taking into account. I've gone through a few "oh crap moments" and managed to overcome each of them, call it training, luck, or a combination of both.
Risks or not I need diving for more than just pleasure, while going to school I could only memorize stuff if studying it underwater, when raising the kids things got overwhelming I needed to reset my brain under water, still today any big decision is considered underwater.

To have now some one come and touch all my stuff, then be by my side for the following hour, to a point that if I turn unexpectedly I will bump into that person... Why? because suddenly it isn't safe? well it isn't safe to have so many hormones and antibiotics on the supermarket chickens, but seems like society as a whole doesn't have a problem with that. Well I refuse to eat that crap and I also need to keep diving my way, hopefully I will die before society has the ability to force me otherwise.