00wabbit
Contributor
Hi
Im getting to the point now where I am much more confident in my skills and am sometimes more skilled than the buddies I get paired with. I travel and dive alone a lot so I always have an instabuddy. I try to size people up on the boat and choose someone with a similar skill level but sometimes I am paired up with a much less experienced diver. I don't mind because I was that guy before and some much more experienced divers from Scubaboard helped me out at first.
My my question is how do you plan a dive with this kind of instabuddy in such a way that will help ease their nerves. Most of these dives are wreck dives from boats in 60-100fsw.
Last week eek I did a dive to 85ft but this vis was a bit low around 20ft and the wreck was somewhat broken up an difficult to follow the outlines. My buddy took off right at first much faster than I would have liked and because of that I didn't get a good chance to survey the wreck. He then thought he was low on air and got concerned about getting back to the anchor. We tried to get back to the anchor to ascend but got a little lost so I decided we should shoot a bag and ascend since he was getting concerned about air. He had plenty, I checked his gauge myself and I was diving double tanks so there was no real worry just his nerves. Fortunately there was no current on this dive so ascending from 85ft on the smb was no problem.
Im in not sure how I would have planned this dive differently except that I would have made sure we paused at the bottom to take a compass reading and made him stay more beside me. Alternatively I think maybe we should have just gone to the bottom of the anchor line and stayed within site of it for the first dive then ventured out further for the second. There was plenty to see without going anywhere. Lots of sand tiger sharks. If the wreck was more intact it would have been easier to follow and not such an issue.
Anyway how do you handle a less experienced someone apprehensive instabuddy?
Im getting to the point now where I am much more confident in my skills and am sometimes more skilled than the buddies I get paired with. I travel and dive alone a lot so I always have an instabuddy. I try to size people up on the boat and choose someone with a similar skill level but sometimes I am paired up with a much less experienced diver. I don't mind because I was that guy before and some much more experienced divers from Scubaboard helped me out at first.
My my question is how do you plan a dive with this kind of instabuddy in such a way that will help ease their nerves. Most of these dives are wreck dives from boats in 60-100fsw.
Last week eek I did a dive to 85ft but this vis was a bit low around 20ft and the wreck was somewhat broken up an difficult to follow the outlines. My buddy took off right at first much faster than I would have liked and because of that I didn't get a good chance to survey the wreck. He then thought he was low on air and got concerned about getting back to the anchor. We tried to get back to the anchor to ascend but got a little lost so I decided we should shoot a bag and ascend since he was getting concerned about air. He had plenty, I checked his gauge myself and I was diving double tanks so there was no real worry just his nerves. Fortunately there was no current on this dive so ascending from 85ft on the smb was no problem.
Im in not sure how I would have planned this dive differently except that I would have made sure we paused at the bottom to take a compass reading and made him stay more beside me. Alternatively I think maybe we should have just gone to the bottom of the anchor line and stayed within site of it for the first dive then ventured out further for the second. There was plenty to see without going anywhere. Lots of sand tiger sharks. If the wreck was more intact it would have been easier to follow and not such an issue.
Anyway how do you handle a less experienced someone apprehensive instabuddy?