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My friend Bob Bailey has an absolutely diabolical dive in his AOW class. As a buddy pair, you descend to around 20 feet, so that you cannot see either the surface or the bottom. You then swim a preset, polygonal path with sides of varying lengths, with one person watching heading, and the other watching depth and time. You cannot take a bearing on a rock, because there are no rocks, and there are no visual references for depth or attitude, either.
When I tried to do this dive, it was a disaster. I ended up completely head down in the water at one point (wondering why my much more experienced buddy was vertical, when in fact he was horizontal and fine, and it was I who was out of kilter) and couldn't maintain depth when it was my job to do that, because I had to watch my gauge every minute, and couldn't look at my buddy without rising or sinking.
So yes, I'm one who had problems with buddy contact during a nav dive! Thank goodness, the average nav dive is much easier, and keeps you in visual contact with the bottom or with structure, where the compass is not the only resource.
Well, to be fair, the purpose of the dive is to train divers how to maintain buoyancy control and buddy communication while achieving a goal ... navigation just happens to be a convenient goal to choose to teach these skills. It's well beyond what most folks will get exposed to in their AOW class ... but then again, I'm trying to train people how to stay together and work together to resolve issues in what can often be very challenging conditions.
To address the OP's question ... positioning and communication are key to keeping together when one or both of you are navigating.
If one of you is doing the compass work, the other needs to assume the role of "communicator". It's your job to maintain yourself in a position where your buddy can see you with little to no effort. Lead-follow doesn't work ... particularly if the follower insists on being "above" the leader. You need to be side-by-side ... no more than about four or five feet apart. If your buddy is concentrating on the compass, it is you who should be keeping track of what else is involved ... depth and travel time, for example ... or fin kicks if on a class dive where such measures are being used. You need to have a way to get your buddy's attention when it's time to change heading, or if something doesn't seem right ... for example, if you think you're straying off course, and you want a "sanity check". You do this by swimming in a position where they can see your hands if you reach out (toward their mask, where you can get their attention).
Also, swim slowly and do things methodically. People who rush through the exercises tend to "forget" things. People who swim fast don't take long at all to swim off course, or to get separated. It's not a race ... be methodical. Maintain a buddy position that allows both of you to see the other without having to constantly turn around or move your body off the plane of the course you're trying to take.
If you can manage it, it also helps to draw a little "map" in your head of about where you are at any given time relative to where you started. In the navigation course I teach, I use a half-dozen flags to define a course. Each flag has a heading on it to the next flag. They're arranged in an irregular pattern ... similar in some respects to how people typically will dive. The final flag simply says "Home" ... telling the students that they now need to find their way back to the starting buoy. If they noted their initial starting depth, and kept a mental note of where they are relative to their starting position, it's a simple matter to swim to that depth and then turn left or right ... maintaining that depth ... until they see the buoy.
Good underwater navigation is all about awareness ... be methodical and keep track of where you've been, and you should always know how to find your way back. Stay within sight of your buddy and it's almost impossible to "lose" them ... even in poor visibility.
That's really all there is to it.
... Bob (Grateful Diver)