What makes a good diver?

[MXGratefulDiver]

What makes a good diver? Mostly a combination of a positive attitude, a healthy dose of common sense, and a strong sense of self-preservation. Everything else can be acquired with practice ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[dumpsterDiver]

Your daughter sounds like she is doing well for a 16 yr old girl. However, nothing you described would give me confidence that she is a good diver.

You will NOT know if she is a good diver until
she gets the crap scared out of her,
maybe slammed by waves,
has a buddy ditch her,
looses the ascent line and has to navigate back to the surface,
until she has had a few gear failures and has demonstrated (to herself) that she can deal with them in the proper fashion,
until she is required to think and act fast to help another diver in need
until she has been put in a situation which uses nearly all of her physical strength and endurance to get out of the situation
until until she does a few dives and says: "well I ain't gonna do THAT again" !

 

[MaxBottomtime]

For starters I checked the DAN website and roughly 40% of fatalities were during a period of time when one diver was separated from their buddy or group. There was a subset of the fatalities noted that 14% were declared as solo divers on a solo dive. While there may be extenuating circumstances why these may or may not be accurate, for the average diver it seems like almost a third of the fatalities involve separation from your buddy as one of the triggers.

So that means that two thirds of the fatalities were while with a buddy. Using that logic, solo diving is much safer.

 

[drrich2]

At first I was going to post this thread about preserving the buddy system. It seems to me that whenever a diver posts a thread with either questions about the buddy system or more commonly a bad experience with a buddy and what to do we can't get through the first page without somebody posting that you are always a solo diver and should dive solo. Why?

That could interpreted a number of ways. I'll try to address them.

1.) That you should dive solo. I don't get that from the solo discussions. It is often put out there as an option some people find workable and preferable, and so it's offered up as an option. Just as changing buddies, getting more training, practicing buddy skills, DIR training, etc..., may get offered. Solo is not the preferred answer for everyone, but it's a fine answer for some, and worth putting on the table for consideration.

2.) That you should not be so dependent on the buddy system (as it is not perfect & thus not perfectly reliable) that in the event of a separation you will panic or otherwise prove dangerously inadequate. The issue of weighing independence vs. interdependence gets hashed out here & there, and views differ, but a sense of having primary responsibility for yourself and the mindfulness it inspires is not a bad thing.

3.) That you should be 'solo capable' before you dive at all. And preferably solo equipped even when buddy diving. In my view, this is overkill.

From the fatality stat.s you mentioned, one might infer that buddy separation can kill, and one ought to be ready to handle an impromptu solo situation should it arise unexpectedly.

Richard.

 

[tbone1004]

So that means that two thirds of the fatalities were while with a buddy. Using that logic, solo diving is much safer.

so I'm 7x more likely to eat it when I am not consciously diving solo, great, I'll bring that up to the next dive boat I'm on, "Sorry Cap'n, according to the death stats, if I eat it there's a 60% chance I'm going to eat it while with a buddy, 36% chance if I lose my buddy, but only 14% if I don't have one, I'll have the chicken then!"

 

[RJP]

So that means that two thirds of the fatalities were while with a buddy. Using that logic, solo diving is much safer.

The odds are 50/50... either you die or you don't!

 

[Akimbo]

The odds are 50/50... either you die or you don't!

Oh... then I am already dead and haven't noticed yet. Explains a lot actually.

 

[billt4sf]

Well, the most important thing I did was to learn what my limits are and stick with them.

- Bill

 

[Steve_C]

Bit of correct math. You have to know the relative size populations. To illustrate say that 50% of deaths occurred while diving with a buddy and 50% happened while solo, and there were 200 deaths. Say for illustration that there are 10,000 buddy dives and 1,000 solo dives. Then, we get a 100/10,000 chance or 1/100 of death while being a buddy diver and a 1/10 chance of death while diving solo.

Without knowing the size of the respective populations, the % is worthless data. But that is true of most numbers I see tossed around.

 

[freewillie]

Thanks all for the responses so far. I was trying to generate a discussion more on being buddies and then using my daughter as one of the examples. Smartest thing I ever did was convince my wife on vacation to let her complete OW training with her friend. Now when we go on vacation she is generally the one insisting that we have chances to dive. She doesn't mind where my wife books the trip during the summer but she requires it to be warm water diving friendly. Lucky me. Lucky her that Dad can foot the bill as well.

Diving is generally a social sport. We are individual divers with individual diving agendas. Some of us like to cover as much of the reef as possible. Some of us would be content to sit and look for small fish hiding in coral and nudibranchs. Some of us don't have cameras and some of us do.

To me it seems that it is a little sad to start saying I had one bad buddy experience and so now I'm going to go solo. I understand the need for self sufficiency. We should all have a basic set of skills so if an emergency or separation occurs then you don't panic. It may not be the separation part but the anxiety and panic that it prompts that contributes to the accident. But it seems a little short sighted to me that we promote the virtues of solo diving and seemingly denigrate the benefit and fun diving with buddies. Some of the best conversations on the dive boat have been after a fun dive with an instabuddy. And I've had a few nightmare dives with an instabuddy.

As for my daughter if the opportunity presents itself I'm going to make her take the lead. That being said it is like any other part of being a good buddy and being part of a buddy team. Two minutes into a dive and making motions for her to lead would not go over well. Telling her before we suit up and before buddy checks would have been the proper time to discuss her leading the dive. Ironically on my last dive in the Bahamas we were following a group of divers. Unbeknownst to me the guide wasn't part of that group. We found ourselves on the reef and couldn't see the guide. Since I normally have a habit of keeping track of where we are and having kept the location of the boat in my head I knew where to go even without my compass. I made a sign to my daughter, "where's the boat?" She didn't know. I teased her a little when we got back on board but next time out I'm going to make sure she practices navigation skills.