I dive both solo and with a buddy. But there is only one buddy that I will now dive with. For my first 100 dives, I did about 75 of them with my dive buddy Dave. As a pilot his work schedule often changes and he's not always free to dive on the weekends, while I always have the weekends off. So following the PADI rule, I chose to "find" a buddy on the weekends that he couldn't dive. In ALL, and I'm not joking, 25 or so dives done with other buddies, I did not have one single enjoyable dive. I've been diving with newbies, with experienced people, and even with people that claim to be diving for the last 25 years (and trust me, those were the worst buddies). I'm not trying to claim that I'm a better diver than those people, but Dave and I have gotten to a point where we were planning our dives on the ride up to the location and de-briefing on the way home. We plan who'd navigating, what drills we are going to practice, how long we're gonna dive, backup plan, etc. We enter the water at 3000psi and always exit at the same pressure, so there's rarely one of us that has to end the dive early.
After many miserable experiences, for the both of us, diving with "unfamiliar buddies", we both decided to try solo diving, for those days that one of us were off and the other wasn't. What we both do now is when we are diving as buddies, we dive as though we are solo, meaning we practice self-reliance, with respect to equipment, procedures, safety drills, etc. Both of us carry a 30 pony, even if we know it's gonna be a 30ft max dive. And we both have the same equipment configuration, like DIR, so we're able to use constructive criticism to make us better divers.
I must admit I prefer to dive with a buddy, because it's always nice to have somebody to share the dive with and talk about all the cool stuff you just saw. But for me, I've become a better solo diver by practicing those techniques even when diving with a buddy.
http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/solo-divers/218743-my-dive-buddy.html
