miketsp
Contributor
I wasn't sure whether this was more appropriate for the Wine & Cheeze Forum or not.
This long holiday weekend we went diving and I'm still a little irritated by one incident.
One of the high points of the weekend was a fairly large wreck, sunk a couple of years ago and although we had had travelled there before, conditions were never adequate for this dive.
Anyway, on the boat the DM says that there is an instructor on board that knows the wreck well and he would be willing to serve as guide to show us (myself and my wife)some of the main features as vis was expected to be nothing fantastic, about 2 - 3m.
This was to give us more flexibility operating in a small group as conditions were difficult, fast surface current running and the boat would not tie on to the wreck.
Anyway we sat down with this (PDIC) instructor to plan the dive and worked out our route which would allow us some time at the prop & rudder at 34m.
When we came to the deco planning, he produced a table which was far more conservative than my CMAS table and for that matter any other table I'd ever seen.
So using his table we planned stops at 14m, 12m, 9m and 6m and since it called for more deco than my table, OK. We established some rock bottom values and turn-around criteria.
Anyway the route down went as planned until we got to about 28m, everything routine, when he signalled that he was aborting the deep part and skipping straight to the spiral route back. I tried insisting but he was adamant and I didn't want to break up the group as we would be doing a drifting recovery. So back up we went.
Anyway even though we had come nowhere near going into deco (either by tables or computer) he still insisted on doing all the stops we had planned.
When we got to the surface I questioned him why we didn't complete the plan and his answer was that vis wasn't very good so it wasn't worth wasting time.
I pointed out that maybe this was true for him, diving there every weekend, but that certainly wasn't true for us as our opportunities to dive this wreck were few and far between.
His answer was that he had no obligation to serve as a guide, he was doing us a favour!
So I swallowed my tongue and kept quiet.
However when we got the next dive site (shallower) I realised that he still had 2 dives to do with 2 newbies (that sat out the first dive) and it became obvious that his main worry was to end the dive with us with as little N2 loading as possible, which would have been impossible if we had followed our original planning.
I felt somewhat cheated.
I can assure you we gave him no motive to abort. Our air consumption was as good as his, our buoyancy was good and we maintained a tight group within easy sight of each other. The vis was as expected around 2-3m and no worse at depth.
What do you guys think, should I have been grateful or not?
This long holiday weekend we went diving and I'm still a little irritated by one incident.
One of the high points of the weekend was a fairly large wreck, sunk a couple of years ago and although we had had travelled there before, conditions were never adequate for this dive.
Anyway, on the boat the DM says that there is an instructor on board that knows the wreck well and he would be willing to serve as guide to show us (myself and my wife)some of the main features as vis was expected to be nothing fantastic, about 2 - 3m.
This was to give us more flexibility operating in a small group as conditions were difficult, fast surface current running and the boat would not tie on to the wreck.
Anyway we sat down with this (PDIC) instructor to plan the dive and worked out our route which would allow us some time at the prop & rudder at 34m.
When we came to the deco planning, he produced a table which was far more conservative than my CMAS table and for that matter any other table I'd ever seen.
So using his table we planned stops at 14m, 12m, 9m and 6m and since it called for more deco than my table, OK. We established some rock bottom values and turn-around criteria.
Anyway the route down went as planned until we got to about 28m, everything routine, when he signalled that he was aborting the deep part and skipping straight to the spiral route back. I tried insisting but he was adamant and I didn't want to break up the group as we would be doing a drifting recovery. So back up we went.
Anyway even though we had come nowhere near going into deco (either by tables or computer) he still insisted on doing all the stops we had planned.
When we got to the surface I questioned him why we didn't complete the plan and his answer was that vis wasn't very good so it wasn't worth wasting time.
I pointed out that maybe this was true for him, diving there every weekend, but that certainly wasn't true for us as our opportunities to dive this wreck were few and far between.
His answer was that he had no obligation to serve as a guide, he was doing us a favour!
So I swallowed my tongue and kept quiet.
However when we got the next dive site (shallower) I realised that he still had 2 dives to do with 2 newbies (that sat out the first dive) and it became obvious that his main worry was to end the dive with us with as little N2 loading as possible, which would have been impossible if we had followed our original planning.
I felt somewhat cheated.
I can assure you we gave him no motive to abort. Our air consumption was as good as his, our buoyancy was good and we maintained a tight group within easy sight of each other. The vis was as expected around 2-3m and no worse at depth.
What do you guys think, should I have been grateful or not?