Best reefs for a new diver?

[cicopo]

Re Christi's warning NOT to go to any of the advanced sites she mentioned I fully agree & if they are offered to you please make a point of letting this board know who offered such a service.
Re the swim throughs the ones I have seen in Coz (not counting Devil's
Throat) are short enough that you can easily use the bubble trails to know where the group is.
Since you are a new diver you want good value, meaning some bottom time. Some ops will take groups down to sites that are rather deep, & in some instances reaching the recommended sport limits. That accomplishes a few things because YOU use up your air in short order, they make the group ascend togther when the first diver gets low, and you all get shortchanged re what you paid for, bottom time. Now some divers think it's great to say they went 120 feet deep or more but they forget that by doing so as rookies it really cut their bottom time down to just a few minutes. The dive op gets it's boat back sooner for another batch of divers which in turn makes them more money at your expense.

 

[ggunn]

Re the swim throughs the ones I have seen in Coz (not counting Devil's
Throat) are short enough that you can easily use the bubble trails to know where the group is.

But the DM will be going through the swimthroughs and a diver who is hanging above and not going through them will be out of the line of sight of the DM and essentially diving alone for those periods of time. This is not a good scenario for a new diver, IMO.

 

[cicopo]

I am not advocating that they avoid the swim throughs, but if due to a depth difference they prefer not to do one they shouldn't think that they will loose the group. I have made this recommendation over the idea of doing an unnecessarily deep profile which is not a good idea either for a new diver. I think it's the lesser of 2 evils to follow the bubble trail vs deciding to follow a group doing a deep profile into a swim through, but that's just my opinion at this time and I am not the DM or an instructor, just another diver. I have however been put into dangerous situations by one op that always took any diver with a C card, even if the ink was still wet, on very deep profiles in Coz, and who didn't seem to think anything about it was dangerous. The first dive of the day almost always exceeded 100 feet, and generally 120 was a common starting depth.

 

[Hinalo]

Knowing to follow the bubble trail is a good fallback in case you are, as I was last week, downcurrent a little from the DM when he enters the rock. We were in moderate current and it would have been very hard to swim back against the current to get to the hole; I would have wasted a huge amount of air and been way behind. For this reason I thought the better option was to watch for the bubble trail, follow it at the top of the rock, where there were lots of pretty things anyway, and meet them when they pop out on the other side.

 

[mstevens]

But the DM will be going through the swimthroughs and a diver who is hanging above and not going through them will be out of the line of sight of the DM and essentially diving alone for those periods of time. This is not a good scenario for a new diver, IMO.

Obviously, there are different ways of looking at this. In my opinion, an Open Water certified diver should not need to be in direct line-of-sight with a Divemaster at all times. Nor is a Divemaster necessarily supposed to be an individual diver's buddy unless that has been explicitly arranged ahead of time (which, as Christi pointed out, is money well-spent).

Example: On one trip my kid was having an ear squeeze so wanted to descend really slowly. That dive, he ended up hurting if he went below about 45 feet. He and I hung out above the group when they went deeper, which did mean they did some swim-throughs we didn't. Of course, they also missed two turtles and a nurse shark that we saw. At that time he was a new diver with only 25 or so dives. I don't see that his being out of sight of the DM was a problem under those circumstances.

I think you were probably actually making a somewhat different point. However, my kid would have had no business diving at all without a buddy (at his age, a parental buddy) nor would any other new or uncomfortable diver have any business relying solely on a divemaster to fill the role of buddy.