TSandM is absolutely right.
Doing a boat dive as your first dive in cold salt water is, in my opinion, most definitely an error in judgment. Personally, I would extend this to say that getting on a boat as your first dive to an environment that requires completely different exposure protection is sketchy at best. Meaning, if you are a cold water diver and you are going to dive the tropics the first time, it is probably not that wise to do a 100ft wall dive of a boat until you've got your weighting figured out.
I like to sort out my weighting requirements in a reasonably benign dive (which usually means a shallow shore dive in a protected area) before I jump on a boat.
Really? I'm just a novice, but my experience has been pretty much that the 'dive pros' take all comers that are in any way apparently qualified.
They probably do take all comers that are "apparently qualified". What constitutes "qualified" or even "apparently qualified" is not clear.
Personally, I do not know of any way to judge some random divers ability to dive other than to go diving with them. If a dive pro (don't know what level of competence a "dive pro" is meant to have) is taking a guest on a boat in Monterey for a first dive in cold water, they are doing so with all kinds of unknowns.
So the net of this is, just because "dive pros" do something doesn't mean it makes sense.
Why is a boat dive in cold salt water more challenging than any other dive in cold water?
Any boat, particularly in the ocean, adds a lot of time pressure to a diver. You need to be squared away before you jump in the water. If you jump in and and only then, you discover that you have issues (like being under-weighted), you will have several problems:
- if there are big seas you will have one heck of a time trying to get sorted out. Trying to sort out issues on a pitching and rocking boat or even worse, in the water. Well, lets just say that this kind of experience is memorable. And not in a good way.
- if you are supposed to be diving as a group along with the other divers and lead by a dive leader, you will now either be keeping everyone waiting or if they descend without you, you are now separated from the group and more importantly, your dive leader, at the very beginning of the dive.
- you will either be wasting bottom time to sort out those issues or you decide to run your dive for the same amount of bottom time as the other divers, those other divers will wind up waiting for you on the boat in unpleasant conditions.
Cold water boat dives only exacerbate the issues as thick exposure protection will obviously require a lot more ballast. Of course, you can aim to overweight yourself so you will not have to deal with being to buoyant at any time during the dive. But this is a really bad idea in case of emergencies. (Those divers that we read about occasionally... the ones that run out of gas, make it all the way to the surface and then sink to the bottom and drown. I can't think of how else that is possible other than the diver was over weighted.)
And btw, the first dive off of boats in Monterey is usually the deeper/more challenging of the two dives. There is no "warm up" dive where in you can get yourself situated. So now walk through the scenario. You are on your first boat dive. You might be a little or a lot sea sick. You jumped in the water only to find yourself under-weighted. You and your annoyed buddy climb back into the boat (which is not trivial given the amount of gear you have on) and you sort out your issues. Hopefully you fix the issues on the first try. The group has decided to go down without waiting for you. You are panting pretty good now having jumped in and climbed out of the boat. You fix whatever issues you have and you and your buddy jump back in the water. After going through all that, you are now going to descend into the deeper/more challenging dive of the day.
Are you having fun yet?
My experience with DMs has been mostly good but some are clearly not as good as others. Maybe some of them shouldn't be considered 'professionals', at least not at the time they were interacting with me. And I am sure that I am not a perfect client.
Are you aware of how much or how little experience or proficiency is required to become a DM?
My biggest complaint is that they all seem to expect people to not be a buddy with anyone, they just expect you to follow them, which, for my first 30 dives, I happily did. It took ScubaBoard for me to find out how important it is to ALWAYS pay attention to your buddy, first!
- Bill
The approach of "everyone dives with a group lead by a DM" is common in the tropics where the vis is usually incredibly good. It is easier in those conditions for a dive leader to keep visual track of the various divers participating on a dive. I don't personally think it is a good approach but I understand why they do it.
In any location where anything greater than 15ft of vis is considered decent, the above approach just does not work. Trying to track a group of people with 15-20ft of vis is an exercise in futility. As far as I know, none of the boats in Monterey send a dive leader down with the dive group. The expectation here is that you have a buddy and you guys dive together. Some boats do allow solo diving also.
Roughly 2/3 of my dives are with one buddy. The other 1/3 has been with a group of three (me and two others). Diving with a group of 3 is about the limit of what I can handle - and that is with 3 people that have a decent of amount of experience, training and dives with each other. I've tried diving with groups of 4. In each and every occasion, I found the experienced to be FUBAR.
