Diving without a dive master or guide.

Do you ever go diving without a guide? I am curious about how many people go diving on their own without signing up to go out with a dive master or some local guide. If you do, how often do you do this? Do you only do this where you live or on vacation too?

Thanks

My wife and I do this all the time, on vacation, to supplement boat diving. Granted, I am a divemaster, but I did this before I had a professional credential. If you want to do diving on your own (with a buddy of course) you should have sufficient experience to be comfortable in the environment where you will dive. You should acquire information about the depths, currents, temperature, and weather when you will be diving. You should plan your dive, and dive your plan. You should have good navigation skills (at least person in the group) in addition to good diving skills generally. It is important to have a shore support person, or at least someone who knows where and when you are diving, your time of departure and expected time of return. Have a good first aid kit with your shore team, and we always have a repair kit. You should have a diver below flag or buoy on each dive as well. Finally, it is important maintain close proximity to your buddy and to be aware of them and their location at all times. Some of our best dives are on or own, or sometimes with another diver or buddy team. They are made enjoyable by proper planning and safety awareness.
DivemasterDennis

People go diving with guides? In California it is a rarity to have a guide. For beach dives I guess it could be done at a few popular locations but it is very much the exception. Diving charters will typically have a dive master but they will not get in the water saving an emergency. Florida is much the same in my experience. In Hawaii and Cozumel the boats do have in water guides, but if you shore dive there are none, or at least none required. I suppose you could hire one if you wanted to.

Out of curiosity what problem are you solving with a guide?

I never use a DM or guide. Even when they are provided I make sure they know that if they expect me to follow them they may be in for a shock. I decide what interests me and what does not. I set the pace of my swims and when to stop and start. All I expect from a DM or guide is a thorough site briefing including depths, currents, and features, allowed bottom times, hazards in the area, and what the recalll procedure is if diving from a boat. My buddy, if I have one, and I make our own dive plan and follow that. If the DM or guide's plan meshes with that so be it. If not ours takes precedence. I do not dive with ops that require me to follow someone I do not know. I have no problem demonstrating my skills and knowledge as well as ability to navigate if that's what it takes for them to leave me alone.

I actually prefer the DM to stay on the boat where they are the most useful. There is nothing wrong with someone that wants a guide or DM. There is something seriously wrong with someone who needs one to keep them from getting hurt, making a comprehensive dive plan, and to set up their gear. Those people should still be in the pool and classroom.

lfshadow:

Do you ever go diving without a guide? I am curious about how many people go diving on their own without signing up to go out with a dive master or some local guide. If you do, how often do you do this? Do you only do this where you live or on vacation too?

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I usually dive without a guide. My buddy and I enjoy diving on our own. That said, I have dived with a guide a couple of times:

1) Three years after my first OW cert, when I had not dived much in the meantime. I was on a dive trip with two friends, so they buddied up and I hired a guide/instructor to be my buddy.

2) The second time I made a deeper dive (first time was in AOW class), it was on a wreck where the dive-op routinely sends a guide down with the divers. We were happy to have a guide for that dive.

I could imagine other dives where I would like a guide, although in general my preference is not to have one.

There isn't any diving where I live, so all my dives are travel/vacation dives.

Blue Sparkle

PS: I see you have a lot of dives under your belt, so I'm curious why you are asking, if you wouldn't mind sharing that.

After I obtained my C-card, I was theoretically qualified to dive with a similarly qualified buddy in conditions similar to those where I trained without a guide. In practice, I just wasn't sufficiently comfortable. I would guess that of my first 100 dives, 95 were with a DM, A/I or Instructor. Diving is supposed to be fun and I just wanted the crutch of a DM (plus they were a lot better at finding interesting critters).

Over time I developed my comfort level (and critter perception). I have found that I prefer to be more of an independent and don't want to follow a herd (is that the correct collective noun) of random divers. I guess that about 50% of my dives are with a guide now (because some boats insist). When ever I am in a new area I will take a guide for a dive or two (to learn the nuances of diving applicable to that region), thereafter I will drop the guide if I can. Preference is now no guide.

I always dive with a guide, either a DM or I make sure that my insta-buddy can get us back to the boat fer shure. That way I don't have to bother with the navigating since I can get lost in a one-chair barber shop.

I would think that diving without a divemaster or other professional accompaniment is more common than diving with one. I dive mostly from boats operated by dive shops, and I would estimate that on half of those trips there is no automatic assignment of a divemaster; we divers are expected to take care of our own navigation. And then there is shore diving, where it's even rarer to have a DM along. It would be an interesting statistic to see what percentage of all dives are unaccompanied by a professional.

Private boat, no guide; locally, Keys and Bahamas.

Local charters; Boynton, no guide. Jupiter, most ops put a guide in the water. There is no requirement to stay with the guides, so "it depends". If I am diving without my buddy, I will stay close to the guide.

Shore diving more often solo than not.

I'd say maybe ten percent of the dives I've done have been guided. I do a lot of shore diving here in Puget Sound, all unguided, and our charter boats here do not put any crew in the water with divers. It is the same for Monterey and Los Angeles. The vast majority of my cave diving is and always has been unguided.

I don't mind diving with a guide in places where there are spectacular but cryptic things to find. The guides we had in Indonesia, for example, had eyes for things like pygmy seahorses, which, if I had had to seek them out myself, I would never have found.