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> Pardon my ignorance. How is OW trimix virtually impossible to do as a 
> buddy team? I probably just spend way too much time with rocks over my 
> head to figure that one out.

"Virtually impossible" might be a bit strong.  "Ususally decreases overall
safety" would be a better way to say it, I think.  In a cave, there aren't
too many options of where your buddy could be - s/he is either ahead of
you, or behind you.  You're not likely to loose sight of your buddy in a
cave, because you each have huge bright lights, and it's otherwise pretty
dark in there - a buddy is sort of hard to miss.  Because you can know the
whreabouts of your buddy almost instantaneously, the buddy can be relied
upon for emergency gas supply. 

In OW, it is relatively easy to loose a buddy, and VERY difficult to find
a buddy once it's lost (especially with a rebreather!!) This means you
cannot rely upon buddies for backup gas - you must work out your own
supply that is independant of your buddy.  Once you've gone to all the
trouble to ensure you can deal with any problem without a buddy, then the
buddy starts to become a liability.  Just one example:  Which of the buddy
pair does the surface support tend to when decompressing buddies have been
separated? Don't really have to worry about that in caves, do you? There 
usually is only one access point to the surface.

Hope that clears things up.

Aloha,
Rich

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