Just one point.. I saw your video from Cozumel I guess. You were the guy in the yellow shorts, right?
Of course it is important to have fun while you dive - after all, it is why we dive. But it is also important to know how to dive proficiently. It is useful in lowering your SAC rate and it is useful in keeping your self safe.
More proficient divers will tend to assume a more horizontal trim while swimming underwater. This reduces the amount of drag and allows you to be more efficient in travelling from one place to another. This efficiency improves your SAC rate. Your gear (including tanks) have a very definite effect on your trim. Steel tanks trim out differently than aluminum tanks.
More proficient divers also tend to minimize the amount of weight that they need to carry on land. If nothing else, it reduces the amount fatigue you experience as you travel to and from the beach. Less weight on land also can potentially be useful in helping you negotiate treacherous surf. In general, steel tanks allow you to have less total weight on land when compared to aluminum tanks.
On to the point.. making choices based on color is fine, assuming all things are equal. However, in this case, all things are not equal. Maybe some of the other folks were a little indelicate in how they tried to make this point but it would be to your benefit to see past it and extract the useful message.
Incidentally, I noticed that you were one of the few who did not wear exposure protection on that dive. I haven't done a lot of warm water diving but even when I did do Maui (~81 degrees) a couple of years ago, I wore a pretty substantial wetsuit. Anyway, just a though.
OK.. you did approach it much more tactfully but what everyone else is doing here is assuming that I have an issue with cutting my dive 4-10 min shorter than others.
Horizontal and holding your hands together and being all "perfect joe diver" is not #1 on my list. I get about 30 dives a year. Based on that, I want to goof off and have fun as much as possible during those 30 dives. Not worried at all about how my profile is in the water. Again, my sac and dac are more stats and for fun for me than to actually worry and plan an elaborate dive based on now much air I will consume at various depths.
I dont do this for a living. Its 100% recreational for me. Meaning I am spending $ I could be putting towards another engine build for my other activities but instead choose to have more of a family fun experience.
Dive tables? I understand them but once you are spoiled on a computer, out the window that concept goes. Sure, my computer may fail. Granted.. but by the time my comp fails, it will have buddies to back it up.. I love me some computers.
Considering I have been sponsored by DuPont and have a $700 paint job on a computer, I must say that I prefer to bring my other hobbies and mix them all together.. I will start with all black equipment then eventually start custom painting my own stuff. Its just what I do with everything from bikes to computers.
The beauty here is that we are all different and get different things out of all the dives.. Camera down there? I want to be the one people at taking pics of.. I will ham it up and enjoy myself. Thats my focus. Not marine life. Not other divers. Not sharks.. Just me, having fun. .and watching my ever depleteing air..
I have no beef with anyone here but wish people would realize that some of us have a clue what we are doing and just choose to do things differently...
You may buy $1500 worth of video cards for your computer and call it a day. I may do the same and start tweaking them till they are certainly on the verge of failure, minimizing their lifespan due to the extra heat stress I have put on them and gain another few frames per second or some extra marks on benchmarks but thats again the difference in people.. some of us dont care about things that others of us will nit pick.
