insta buddy nightmares

[k ellis]

After reading another thread I was just curious to hear other peoples insta buddy nightmares. Here is mine on a recent dive trip.

1. a 19 year old diver begins to cough and hack and not be able to speak at the surface but regains control of her breathing and says everything is ok. She tells the divemaster she has had Asthma in the past but it doesnt bother her anymore. She continues the dive with no other problems though I had concerns and spoke up I was over ruled. (I did not really care one way or the other just had to speak up for the what ifs.)

2. a guy was surface swimming to the front of the dive boat and his snorkel broke. He begin to kick around and cough and show signs of distress. This was a simple fix though as we told him to just put some air in his bcd. This remedied that problem.

3. a more supposed experienced diver on the boat was paired up with a VERY new diver who was herself highly concerned about diving in a new location unfamiliar to her. At 80 feet he had a panick episode and shot up to the surface. (Apparently without any injuries noticeable) He did convince the dive master he was ok to dive the second dive though and did so only to repeat the episode at 40 feet.

4. several of the divers on this outing were for some reason very friendly and tended to be tighter then the schools of goat fish we seen. So close in fact only the neoprene seperated them I think from performing well other duties.

Day 2 same group.

1. We go into the drift dives of Cozumel which is fine this group is doing a little better today. However the ever present swatting of divers with other divers fins was a very real and recurring site.

2. several divers who try to get the same picture at the same time really aggrivated the sea life with some near misses on the defense the creatures put up.

3. upon surfacing the groups really did not surface well at all heads were all over the sea and appeared to be 100s of feet apart. (Which I deployed my Safety sausage to assure I wasnt lost at sea and the EXTREME number of boats that seemed to make a complete circle around us.)

4. it was learned that one person on our group was not paying attention to his air and decided it was time to come up from the bottom with 250 pounds of air remaining at 80 feet. Not a good scenario and he blew his safety stop of course.

 

[Insta-Gator]

...

1. We go into the drift dives of Cozumel which is fine this group is doing a little better today. However the ever present swatting of divers with other divers fins was a very real and recurring site.

All too common on cattle boats. My wife had her masks kicked off by a gadfly diver who thought zipping from coral head to coral head as quickly as possible was the way to see the most What an ARSE!

 

[RTee]

On my first trip to Cozumel in Mar 09, I saw an individual on his second or third outings returning to the boat just as we were descending. He experienced problems clearing his mask. So at the end of the dive I asked him if he had found the leak and to that he replied that his mask was OK...the problem was he could not remember the proper technique to clear his mask so instead of securing the upper part of his mask and exhaling through his nose while pulling the bottom part away from his cheeks he kept doing the opposite which only resulted in flooding his mask time after time so the DM suggested he returned to the boat...
As he was telling me, it made me remembered a joke a kid pulled on another kid during my early years at primary school...he dared the other kid to drink water from a glass by putting his lips on the upper part of the rim instead of the bottom part without getting wet...which the other kid miserably failed...

 

[j.doe]

Went diving in the Mayan, and was paired with an "Advanced" diver. I could tell right away, that it was attitude all the way. Crap don't stink kinda guy.

Anyways after agreeing to descend on the line due to high current, we do the back roll in and zoom. Gone like a shot to the bottom no where near the descent line. I was unable to follow due to equalization issues, but hey, I kinda did not want to follow this retard anyways.

It was a relatively deep but short dive. He stayed say 200 to 300 m from the group chasing and grabbing on to a turtle but after 10 minutes came rocketing over "Out" not just short of air. I had over 2000lbs in my tank still, but by the time we "Buddy" breathed the idiot to the surface we were at 120lbs.

Then the best part, when we got to the surface, no thank you's were exchanged. All he said was "did you see me surfing that turtle" and "I got to the bottom the fastest", like it was a race or something. He was promptly ejected from our group.

 

[LakeCountyDiver]

An Insta buddy is someone you get paired up with at last moment to do a dive Right? Not just any random moe in the water doing dumb S&!#

 

[DennisS]

I was paired with a young lady who did marathons. She took off and all I saw were her fins as I struggled to keep up. She never looked back and I couldn't even catch her to tell her I was ending the dive due to low air.

In Cozumel I was paired with a large guy that would not stay with the group. I followed him and signaled for us to get back with the group. We returned to the group where he took off again. I let him go his own way, he ended up getting picked up by another boat. The next dive he stayed with the group and was having fun blowing air rings and doing somersaults. He was out of air in 20 minutes and I reluctantly surfaced with him.

 

[LakeCountyDiver]

Very similar to J.doe post I agreed to dive with this guy that wanted to do a dive in a spring. He was OW but been to 150' 1000'in a cave you know an idiot. I did not know that at the time but anyway his idea of a long deep dive is to shoot down to the bottom like he is holding a weighted sled. Stay there till he is about out of air then GET THIS Fill his BC up and rocket to the surface. Does not know or care about ABT's and NO-DECO limits.

I have never seen such stupidity in my life and will never dive with anybody like him again. Since this experience I have made my self very self reliant. I only now dive with people I get to talk to first making sure that they are not going to try to kill themselves.

 

[scubadiver888]

I have been on my share of cattle boats. I travel with my wife and she doesn't dive. So pretty much every dive I do away from home is an insta-buddy dive.

Insta-Buddy #1: Buddy was wearing a Cochran computer, $10000 in photography equipment, ScubaPro everything, dive flag tattoo and wearing 30 pounds of lead (3mm wetsuit in tropical waters). As we get to the bottom she dumps all the air from her BCD and drops like a rock. A plume of dust goes up as as she hit the coral. She takes a couple of pictures, squats down, holds the inflator button and leaps off the coral. Pretty much EVERY time there was someone above her and she hit them.

Insta-Buddy #2: Diving a deep wreck in high current. You must go down the line hand over hand or the current will take you away. I head down for the wreck pulling myself down. I don't bother with finning as it will do no good in this current. Insta-buddy is kicking like crazy. I'm diving with an HP119 as I determined I would need that much nitrox 28 to do the dive. Insta-buddy is diving an AL80. I get to the wreck and pause for a second. Insta-buddy comes up on me and I go to move out of the way to let them by. He grabs my legs making it impossible to kick. Current starts taking us away so I grab the nearest thing I can find. Check his gauge and see he has 500 PSI left. The plan was to drift off the wreck and have the boat pick us up. He refuses to let go of the line and starts heading back up the line, against the current. I follow him up the line to wait for him to run out of air. Dive instructor comes by and signals he'll take care of him and buddies me with someone else.

Insta-Buddy #3: Dive a wreck at 80 feet. Buddy has no reel, light or wreck training. Heads for the wreck at breakneck speed. By the time I catch up to him I'm just in time to grab his fins as he enters a hatch on the deck. I pull him out and signal no to penetrating the wreck. He takes off and heads for the tower. It is open but going up the stairs is a little tight. I follow after him but cannot keep up to him. As I go up a set of stairs my tank hooks on something. Stairs are tight and I cannot get my hands behind me to feel what I'm hooked on. I look at the top of the stairs and insta-buddy is standing there watching me. I wait for him to come help. No joy. I remove my gear, slide down the stairs, unhook my gear, go up the stairs and put my gear back on. Insta-buddy is running low on air so he heads up the line. I follow. At the safety stop he has 200 PSI left. Course Director was diving with us, notices his low air and puts him on his octo. On the boat he talks to me about how I was really stuck on the wreck stairs. I ask why he didn't help me and all I get is an "I don't know." and a shoulder shrug.

I can go on and on. I should also say that for every nightmare insta-buddy I have had there have been just as many good buddies.

 

[Aaron528]

In the Keys last winter I boarded a 6 pack as a solo diver and the other 4 people were couples, so not much choice about who I was buddied with. This guy is sitting around bragging about how great his gear is and lamenting "it's not deep, why can't I just dive by myself." In hindsight it would have been much better for me to tag along with one of the couples and insist this guy stick with the DM. We did a back roll together off opposite sides of the boat because it was small; we descended together, all well and good. But 5 mins into the dive I stop for literally 30 seconds to take a photo (after signaling him I was doing so), and when I look up he's gone. So I go searching around for the requisite minute or two, then not seeing him, I ascend to look for him on the surface. Nothing. I informed the boat captain the guy is missing, and I waited there for 5 more mins bobbing like a cork to see if he'll show, occasionally looking down to see if I can see him cuz the viz was excellent. Nothing. The dive clock is ticking. So I see the DM with one of the couples tooling around, and I drop there, write on my slate that he's gone and the ENTIRE GROUP begins looking for the guy. We spent our entire dive doing a coordinated search pattern of the area, using the boat as a base, only to have the captain see him pop up (with nothing left in his tank) several hundred yards away in a shipping lane. Captain begins banging furiously on the ladder and we all come up.

Not a bad experience if you're practicing for rescue diver, but it wasn't exactly what I signed on for. Needless to say, the guy was not permitted to go on the next dive.

 

[CAPTAIN SINBAD]

While diving NC last year, I was on nitrox and was paired up with an older diver who was on air. This I felt was unfair to me because I paid for a longer bottom time and would have to abandon dive because of his shorter bottom time. Then I saw this person become very sea sick and I believe he did not even stay down there to complete even his on air time.