Hi Michael,
Thanks for your response. Your criticism is very well stated and you stated it in a non-combative format. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to converse (or type) with you about this topic.
I disagree with your conclusions
Mark,
It seems about risk/pain/reward, on the boat deck.
Asking the captain to dive solo is great and the right course. Doing it publicly in front of the assembled passengers, maybe not so great, if that is where you did so. I think the place to advocate is with the captain, or owner, as a paying customer that wants to responsibly dive this way, by standards of an agency they likely operate under.
For the crew, an issue is that most certifications are only a loose statement of ability. How we approach the crew may help that statement, ‘I’ve been doing X, Y, Z diving and have C, D, and solo certs.’ So the solo cert is part of the bigger picture, and sets a context for any beginners nearby. Rescue, or your Tec 40 and DAN O2 would seem part of setting that picture. Your ‘solo card flash’ came off a bit abrupt.
I’m not trying to shield new divers from truths, I just think most are busy still working on the basics of control and awareness, for which keeping track of a buddy helps. The option of solo diving and certs is 10’s of dives away for most of them. I might as well clutter their mind about rebreathers v.s. OC trimix for wrecks. That is kind of stretching the point. But good buddy vs bad buddy vs solo, seems to call in question something they are just getting a handle on, environment awareness and redundancy, of a buddy. And the answer doesn’t affect them yet, because they are not experienced enough to make the shift, and the training, or at lest the cert, to do so is not generally available until they are. Bad buddy vs good buddy affects them. Buddy vs solo not so much, and confuses that whole must have and be a good buddy thing, while that is the only type diving available to them. The story changes some if it’s a 25+ dives only boat.
Bottom-up feedback directed effectively is good. The “gasping, guffaws, and gnashing of teeth can be priceless!” did not paint that picture, maybe it was just that was the reaction you got.
Constructively educating and moderating the 10 dive self imposed scuba police is great. It seems like ‘advanced training and equipment’ are key phrases. Priceless is having the crew appreciate how you do it,
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I think a trained equipped competent responsible solo diver is fairly safe, particularly with a boat with lookout, oxygen, and radio on the surface close to advanced EMS, which is the world of many for hire boats, and likely safer than chasing behind a panic prone new diver. A *similar* solo trained etc. buddy, or two, makes them about as safe as they are going to get, for being offshore and underwater
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I have sympathy for the beginner’s world, getting to either of those points from a zero dives beginner, surrounded by low dive beginners, is a long process. I learned alongside very good buddy beginners, so I don’t really know how most people work through it. My recent experience is assisting in teaching one of those, vaulted or disparaged, 100 hour cert courses, but we start from AOW divers, and drill being *very* good buddy divers. I do not know the learning world outside that.
On being an effective advocate, there is a nuclear case to watch out for. Doubles are perfectly reasonable to dive with, yet some boats may not allow them on rec. trips for various reasons, space, extra crew, what ever. I’ve read descriptions that some insurers view boats imposing buddies on certified solo divers as a legal risk and forbid it. It is at least a legal question if that means those boats must support solo diving, no matter how much disruption the divers cause with the passengers and crew. It may be they can just say ‘because of insurance requirements and the costs of rec. trip confusion we only allow certified solo divers on tech trips. Sorry.’ I don’t think solo certified divers are a protected class.
On cert equivalences, do boat insurance companies now consider all three equal? Insurers may care about details not examined in the SDI one line per cert comparison across a long list of certs. Though I would think that list helps with the public. *If* insurers in the past examined all the certs and judged only some sufficient, it seems hard to transition to accepting new version of those passed over, unless a new cert were created, in terms of effectively distinguishing between an old and a new version of the same named cert.
I feel the pain of going overseas and wanting support for non-beginners. I’m going to the Caribbean and even pony refill support was not readily apparent.
Unfortunately the beginner rec. trips and beginner DMs may be a price for more or cheaper boats. I’ve liked 25+ dive boats much better, but they were not always available.
Michael
