I personally have no "problem" with the buddy system, but I have issues with the refusal to promote self-sufficiency/redundancy for basic open water divers. To instead rely upon the perfect execution of the buddy team to provide safety (via the redundancy of a buddy's air supply) seems impractical.
It sounds to me that your ACTIONS reveal a similar feeling. You confirm that great buoyancy control and situational awareness are skills necessary to perform as a good buddy team in your waters, yet you REFUSE to believe that ANY OW certified divers have these skills until they have completed MORE DIVES after their certification class.
With Lynn (initially) saying she will use a pony bottle if she doesn't know a dive buddy and you refusing to allow certified divers into your AOW class (until their deficiencies have been remediated), how do you continue to advocate that the buddy system (as taught in the current recreational setting) is robust enough to avoid the option of teaching a redundant gas supply in an initial class?
And it should be obvious, but I will state it anyway. I'm not saying that a redundant system should supplant the teaching of the buddy system, but rather enhance the divers safety, so they can be safer in the typically "weak" buddy teams we see so often.
To be extremely concise, it is much easier to teach someone how to use a pony bottle than provide them sufficient dives and training to ensure that all the skills necessary for good buddy diving are acquired.
So maybe you both feel that teaching and learning the buddy system is not rocket surgery, but (at the very least) your actions both seem to confirm your doubts about the ability of recently certified divers to execute buddy diving properly.
... but I never said a word about redundancy, so I don't understand how you jumped to those conclusions.
Redundancy and good buddy skills are NOT mutually exclusive. The mindset of self-sufficiency and that of being a good buddy are not mutually exclusive ... in fact, at their core they have a lot of overlap. Those are tools ... to be learned, developed, and applied as circumstances and personal choices dictate.
Quite a few of my students choose to carry a pony. I carry one when I solo dive, but rarely when diving with a buddy, as a good buddy reduces the need for air redundancy below what I consider acceptable risk. What I will NOT allow in my class is the development of an attitude that carrying a pony bottle makes good buddy skills unnecessary, as it only addresses one of the potential reasons why one might choose to dive with a buddy.
Skills development is a continuum. One of the great fallacies of dive instruction is the notion of "mastery" ... what exactly is that term supposed to mean? It's for certain that one cannot "master" any skills during an Open Water course ... the purpose of the class isn't to teach you the skills so much as it is to teach you how to learn them. Learning comes from repetition and practical application ... and that takes dives. Granted, for some it takes more dives than for others. But I have yet to meet the person who can "master" anything much beyond underwater survival in an Open Water class ... and that's regardless of the instructor or agency involved.
Furthermore, in your focus on only one highlighted comment, rather than the entirety of what I said, you misrepresented ... as you often do ... what I said. Please read the sentence directly following what you highlighted ... I'll quote it for you, in fact ...
But it does NOT take anything like exceptional skills ... buddy diving is more about mindset and understanding the framework in which a buddy team dives successfully than it is about physical skills. It only requires that you don't have to struggle to maintain your buoyancy control ... which frees up enough mental bandwidth for you to begin to learn about and deal with task loading.
... so no ... I did NOT say that it takes, as you claim I said, "great buoyancy control" ... in fact I stated quite the opposite. All it takes is sufficient buoyancy control to allow you to concentrate on other things ... which is when you're able to free up enough mental bandwidth to start working on awareness skills. The major reason why the buddy system breaks down is because people ... particularly, but not exclusively new divers ... neglect to develop awareness skills. The problem with viewing "self-sufficiency" as a reasonable alternative to buddy diving is that it also requires those same awareness skills, but applied in a different manner.
I'm actually quite in favor of divers developing self-sufficiency skills. What alarms me sometimes is all this promotion of that path as an alternative to development as a dive buddy ... because it often points to a person who is either too lazy to develop their skills adequately, or someone who concludes that carrying a pony bottle somehow makes them "self-sufficient". Nothing could be further from the truth. Self-sufficiency ... like buddy diving ... is more about your mental approach to the dive. And the parallels in mindset between the two systems have more in common than most self-sufficiency promoters realize. Either way, diving's more about making good decisions than it is about what gear you're carrying or who you're diving with.
That leads, I believe, to why you so frequently misunderstand what I post in these threads. I'm not about promoting one style of diving over another ... or promoting the use of a particular type of equipment. Those are just tools, and tool selection is often highly personal and usually determined by the environment in which you dive. What I'm about is training divers how to make good choices by evaluating risks, making realistic assessments about what they can and can't do about them, and putting some thought into how and with whom they're going to dive. It has a great deal to do with where I predominantly dive, and the fact that I'm training people to dive "here". We don't do group dives. We don't follow guides. We don't rely on other people to make our decisions for us. That, in itself, implies self-sufficiency. But it has nothing at all to do with diving with a buddy, or developing good buddy skills.
If you want to be self-sufficient, that's great. If you want to dive solo, that's OK too. But if you're going to commit to diving with another person, then I think it's imperative that you take that commitment seriously enough to understand what it means, and develop the skills needed to take the commitment seriously.
... and that is the foundation upon which I base my classes ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
