Collapse of the "Buddy System"

[flots am]

After my last dive I am convinced that the buddy system exists only on paper and in reality everyone just "solo-dives" without realizing it. I did a few experiments with an insta-buddy and they did not go too well.

It takes two divers to lose a buddy. If yours lost you, it's only because you let him get away or just weren't watching.

That said, how you dive is a decision. I'm solo certified and actually prefer it for easy dives, however for deep wreck penetrations or things that have a significant possibility of being fatal if they go badly, I dive with a buddy. A real buddy. One of maybe 5 people I actually trust with my life.

"Buddy distance" is just like the old AT&T slogan "reach out and touch someone". If I can't reach out and poke my buddy in the leg or grab a fin or tap a shoulder, it's too far. We both work at this.

Is this a realistic concern or should we all just shut up and dive?

Depends on the dive and the consequences of screwing up.

~40' on the house reef at Buddy Dive? I don't really care where my '"buddy" is. 140' on a freezing cold, pitch black wreck where mistakes can be fatal, I know where he is every moment.

In the end, it's really your call, however I'll give you credit for trying the "out of air" exercise. Nothing brought home the concept of "buddy distance" until one of my instructors had us do that into current.

flots.

 

[ezediver]

In all my years diving I have never had a instabuddy that I had faith and trust in. I have had some great dive buddys though ,some that I had logged dozens if not hundreds of dives with. It is a great feeling knowing the guy diving with you and knowing he is as good or better diver than you are.
So no the buddy system is not dead but does need work and as stated by many it is a skill that takes familiarity and practice that you just dont have with a instabuddy.

 

[flots am]

The only true legitimate safety concern I see is a catastrophic failure of a LP line and given a clear overhead, a basically competent OW diver should be able to handle it and ‘sip’ the line to the surface,

Don't forget about:

• Didn't watch gas and ran OOA.
• Turned upside down, found out that the tank was contaminated and now the first stage is clogged
• Blown tank neck o-ring
• Blown yoke or DIN o-ring
• First stage blew in half (actually happens on some older SCUBAPros that weren't maintained properly)
• Wasn't paying attention and has 5 minutes of gas and a 20 minute deco obligation

I'm sure there are more, but I'm tired and this was all that immediately came to mind.

You always need either fully redundant gas or easy, sure, fast access to the surface.

flots.

 

[NAM001]

You bring up some very good points. Most of the times I see a diver pair.... they are just that a pair in the water. You mentioned that process of taking those few minutes to set some rules for the dive... That alone drastically changes the other divers views of the dive. Hmmmm so we have rules on this one????? and then most all goes well or at least better than parking suiting up and jumping in. Most of the time that other guy has never had to do any formal process prior to just jumping in.

I have found that most insta-buddies are fine as dive buddies, but that I have to talk to them about what I am looking for before the dive. If I expect them to really be available, I use a phrase like "shoulder to shoulder" "within reach" "arms-length" or "a couple of meters." If the dive is tough (deep, cold-water, fast drift, low viz ), I expect the buddy to be within reach. If the dive is easy (follow the DM on a shallow reef dive), I am not as fussy. Sometimes I have to take more initiative to "stick" to them, but no one has refused to do a within-reach approach if I have suggested it. If an insta-buddy did not want to stick close, I would assess whether I was happy to effectively solo on the dive.

I notice that many divers use a "lead and follow" approach, which I don't like: If I am the lead, I have to keep constantly turn completely around to track them; if I am the follower, they are not necessarily aware of where I am. Instead, I prefer "shoulder to shoulder" because I can constantly see them out of the corner of my eye. If I am with a new diver or seriously unskilled diver, I really strongly prefer shoulder to shoulder. With an experienced, skilled buddy, I am more casual about this.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

The buddy system is only dead if you kill it.

Buddy diving is a lot of work. It's not really a skill that's difficult, it's a skill of self control (keeping your impulses under control.)
When I used to buddy dive, we had a protocol, one diver is primary and the second diver is support. The primary diver ran the dive. If they wanted to hunt or take photographs they did whatever they wanted and the support diver was there as a buddy just for them. On the second dive we traded. On the third dive, if there was one, we flipped a coin.
The problem I ran into was that when it was my turn to be primary the buddy always was too cold or too tired and wanted to go home, leaving me feeling like I was just there to be the little boy pee-on support punk while he got a great dive in and then didn't want to fall back to second position.
It's amazing how selfish people really are. This would happen routinely with many different buddies. That's why I quit kidding myself and realized I was really actually solo diving. So I just started solo diving and if I happen to be in the water with a friend and we losely dive around each other we both know we are solo diving.
To really make buddy diving work you have to run side by side and look at each other every 3 kick cycles, that's about 4-5 seconds, and never be further than 5 feet away.
The primary/support system is really the only real way the true buddy system effectively works as far as I'm concerned. Some people claim that they can both do activities, but all it takes is for one diver to get distracted for a few seconds and wander off to look at something behind a rock and the other diver get ahead two or three kicks and right then the buddy system has failed. Losing eye sight for any length of time and it's failed. If anything happens to either diver for that few seconds they are apart it's a failure.

 

[TSandM]

These threads make me so sad.

If you want to know how to have good dive buddies, look into GUE training. In our world, dive buddies are good buddies.

There is no need at all for people to be bad buddies. Dumpster Diver is right; situational awareness and team skills take work, and definitely get better with good training. But the primary requirement for a good buddy is that the person have the desire to BE a good buddy. Find people who WANT to be good buddies, and you can form functional teams.

 

[TMHeimer]

It takes two divers to lose a buddy. If yours lost you, it's only because you let him get away or just weren't watching.

*************************

Maybe. Or, he just took off. If I reach down to pick up a shell and now he's not within grabbing distance and he doesn't frequently eyeball me, he may be gone. I may not be watching for all of 5 seconds if that. Things like this can happen and it's not the fault of both people. And they can happen even though the discussion of staying close took place.

---------- Post added September 30th, 2014 at 11:05 PM ----------

These threads make me so sad.

If you want to know how to have good dive buddies, look into GUE training. In our world, dive buddies are good buddies.

There is no need at all for people to be bad buddies. Dumpster Diver is right; situational awareness and team skills take work, and definitely get better with good training. But the primary requirement for a good buddy is that the person have the desire to BE a good buddy. Find people who WANT to be good buddies, and you can form functional teams.

I haven't done GUE training (haven't heard of it being in our area), but have heard very good things about it. Problem for me (and I imagine many others) is I am always a single diver on a charter as my wife doesn't dive and we snowbird together in places where there are few people diving in winter, let alone meeting a good buddy who may want to get on the rare charter that goes out then.

 

[Crush]

At last. A worthy thread that tells it how it is opposed to how it ought to be. Brand new divers are good buddies. Somewhere along the line they get to be too cool to buddy. I try to communicate my expectations pre-dive but often there is a near rolling of eyes. When I complain about it in SB an insular group that doesnt dive with most of the real world blames my "don't cramp my space dude" buddy on me.

 

[PfcAJ]

I haven't done GUE training (haven't heard of it being in our area), but have heard very good things about it. Problem for me (and I imagine many others) is I am always a single diver on a charter as my wife doesn't dive and we snowbird together in places where there are few people diving in winter, let alone meeting a good buddy who may want to get on the rare charter that goes out then.

Even if your buddy doesn't have GUE training, a GUE class will leave you with a good overview of things to sort out with your buddy pre-dive. Things like who's leading, whats expected, minimum gas, max bottom time, separation protocol, deco strategy (min deco, safety stop, screw it lets just go up, whatever), going over each others equipment so you know where things are, etc. This is in addition to all the other good stuff in GUE classes.

 

[drrich2]

These threads seem to bring out common themes repeatedly.

1.) Many people on ScubaBoard believe the buddy system should entail routine practice of close proximity shoulder-to-shoulder or near equivalent diving with mutual situational & buddy awareness and frequent monitoring of the buddy, ready to intervene quickly in case of emergency.

2.) In the 'real world' of vacation diving, and even local diving for some, insta-buddies are a common fact of life and often won't adhere to such a system, and even regular buddies often won't, either. So, unless you haul your GUE-trained team around with you...(with a good natured nudge to TSandM...).

For the high-viz., often warm water tropical vacation diving a lot of people do, a more lax approach to the buddy system is obviously common (one thing I guess most all of us would agree on), and it's easier to go with the flow than try to impose your diving world view on a one-shot buddy. As some pointed out, many random insta-buddies are open to some buddy system practices; pre-dive gear check, staying closer to each other than the usual, etc... But a lot of people won't adhere to tight buddy procedure. You can follow closely beside the person if you wish, of course.

Yet the overwhelming majority of these people return from their dives without death or serious injury, and I imagine the majority had a good time.

I think a few factors impact people's attitude on this:

1.) Dive conditions - shallow tropical reef vs. deep diving a wreck in the Great Lakes.

2.) How you were trained - as Jim Lapenta pointed out, what your training suggested was & wasn't important, the values you incorporated early.

3.) Your personality - are you normally a situationally aware, team-focused person who likes engaging and adhering to formal standard practices (e.g.: 'rules')? Or are you a more laid back sort who's more casual in your approach?

4.) Your attitude toward risk. Example: Say you were to crunch the numbers and discovered that on a given dive the way most people buddy, your risk of death or serious injury was 1 in 100,000, but if you dove TS&M's GUE team way, it dropped to 1 in 1,000,000. If that were the only issue, would you say 'Oh, well, that's different,' and change your dive style? Or would you say '1 in 100,000 ain't bad' and accept that risk as the cost of doing things your way?

5.) Your attitude toward de facto social norms. Even if you believe all buddy teams ought to be diving the formal way some purists on the forum endorse, when you get on a dive boat, you can either 'When in Rome, do like the Romans,' or compromise - talk it up with the insta-buddy and accept some crude improvements, like a rough pre-dive plan, hand signal review & plan to stay close together, or take the option to be a 'crusader for change' - you're going to school that insta-buddy on how this buddy dive is going to be done!

Personally, on warm tropical dives with good viz., I try to stick close to...the guide. That's the person who knows the route & will get back on the boat at the end of the dive. If I'm with the guide, so will I. If I am assigned an insta-buddy, which I don't ask for but when in Rome, he/she is welcome to stick with me.

Richard.

P.S.: File under all or nothing, black or white thinking - I notice a tendency to divide buddy diving into 2 groups; formally compliant excellent buddy procedure pairs, and 'might as well be solo diving' pairs, with a denial of shades of grey. If I'm diving single tank with no pony at 90 feet going around the far side of the Hilma Hooker wreck in Bonaire, and my gas supply somehow gets cut off, I would rather have a buddy 20 feet away than no buddy at all. Even if a bad buddy only offers 30% of the risk mitigation of a good buddy, that's still something.