Art, the scenario you describe is not unique.  What I describe is not
typical boat diving for my area, but rather the way I do it, and the
only way I will do it.  There are several boats operating here,
especially on day trips, that load themselves to the gunwales with
divers who don't know each other, and have a quick and useless safety
briefing ten minutes before the first team is in the water.  The
difference is that I refuse to participate in ill prepared trips like
this.  Even a bunch of divers (buddy teams) who don't know each other
can pull off a well orchestrated series of dives, but you need to take
the time to familiarize yourself with others' objectives, choose
profiles accordingly, and develop a dive plan that makes the most
efficent use of the resources available without comprimizing safety. 
Everyone on board needs to be on the same wavelength - much easier if
you if you have the entire boat, good people, and plan these things
well in advance.  I have the luxury of diving with a competent group of
people, and afford to DIR by doing fewer trips.  I have, in the past,
arranged dive trips with participants from Washington, BC and Alaska,
just to get 6 people I would dive with.  Start following rule #1 - I
guarantee you will start enjoying this a whole lot more.

-Sean



On Sun, 29 Aug 1999 18:18:41 -0400, Paltz, Art wrote:

>I think I'm starting to see the difference here.  Personally, I'd love to
>move up by you, boats are bigger with lots of space and all the divers doing
>similar profiles.  This would be great!  I typically don't do multiple day
>diving trips.  I'm not saying right or wrong here, just the way the
>operations are run and dives are performed.
>
>I rarely charter an entire boat.  Typically I'm going on an open boat, like
>most people up here if they are diving from a larger boat.  With this you
>end up having people who don't know each other, have different experience
>levels and are doing different profiles.  My artifact buddy and I will plan
>between ourselves and let the crew know the expected in-water time.  
>
>From other conversations I've had with others off list, here's the
>situation.  You have people on the same boat that are either doing one dive
>or a repeat dive.  In each of these groups you have dive teams doing
>decompression and those doing no deco profiles.  To give an example, you can
>have people entering the water for a first dive at 9:00am.  Some of these
>divers will come up in 20 minutes adhering to no deco limits while others
>will do say 90 minutes of run time.  Usually while the decompressing divers
>are surfacing (say 10:00am) the one dive people are getting in, we pass on
>the line.  The same thing happens when the one dive people are coming up,
>the repeat divers are getting in (say noon time).  This gives the situation
>where people are always getting in or getting out.
>
>Trying to plan when to send up artifacts will probably end up with the
>artifact being in someone else's bag.  If you see a nice big porthole
>sitting there (a really rare occurrence) and you say, "I'll leave it here
>and tell the crew I'm going to bring it up next time", someone else is going
>to send it up.  Better to hook a bag to it, tie it to the wreck and send it
>up than to have it end up in someone else display case!
>
>Seems you have larger boats than we have here.  I think the biggest boat I
>dive from is the Wahoo or Seeker, both are about 68 feet long I think.  The
>typical number of divers on these boats varies but a numbers of 12 to 18 are
>common.  That's roughly between 3.5 to 5.5 feet per person on a one day
>trip.
>
>I think the main problem is there isn't a set schedule because everyone on
>the boat is not one big team with one goal.  You've got probably up to 8
>different teams in the water all with different entry times and profiles.  I
>think this is the difference between your dives and ours.  Seems your diving
>is from a boat where the entire team dives similar profiles.  This isn't the
>case on an open boat.
>
>Can't help/comment on  the situation where you have different groups on the
>same boat with different plans.  I can't see a way around this.  I don't
>know enough people doing the kinds of diving I do to coordinate such a plan.
>I don't have a solution and it's time to leave work and spend some time with
>my family.
>
>Art.



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