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On 8/8/02 10:53 AM, "Jim Cobb" <cobber@ci*.co*> wrote: > If you don't make this substantial time and money consuming effort you > might as well toss the dice, put the single bullet in the revolver, tie > the vine to your leg and take the leap. You may die, you may not. > > Solo is better if you decide to do the crap-shoot. There will be no > witnesses when you croak and the coroner can safely declare a "heart > attack" to satisfy the insurance underwriters. Jim, So you're saying that unless two divers were trained together and dive together they can't be effective enough buddies to be useful when a problem develops? I was going to say that this was too stupid to even comment on, but I don't want to fall into the common trap here of getting insulting and attacking the person and not the points made. So you're not stupid, just maybe a little too enamored of some rigid thinking. Divers have been diving as successful buddy teams all over the world who have never met and never dove together. Some have better skills than others, but a reasonably intelligent diver can assess after a single dive and often BEFORE a dive whether or not a particular buddy is worth diving with. I think the solo diving proponents main whine is "what if I can't find a good buddy on a dive boat." The answer is simple. Don't dive that day. Now go pout. I've been on liveaboards and dive boats in many places in the world and my experience has been that one can almost always find a competent buddy for the purposes of recreational diving. Where tech diving is concerned, the requirements must be stiffer and there I'd advise a more stringent "check out" before committing oneself to any partnership where the conditions are more extreme. Matching gear and techniques is part of that validation process. But to place a personal requirement that all divers one dives with MUST be DIR when photo-diving E-6 in Fiji is absurd. It'd be a short dive vacation if you're alone. And as JJ stated in his response to Steve Berman's death: "I am essentially certain that with a qualified dive buddy none of these things would have mattered. Reaching within 100feet of one's stage bottle indicates that all but the worst of buddies could have made the difference. My belief is that even without assistance the presence of a second person to monitor time and gas would have prevented any air related issue in the first place. Solo diving adds another layer of risk that can be difficult to manage in many situations. I am very familiar with managing risks and choosing which risks seem worth the reward. For me solo diving is not a risk worth the 'reward'." Note the phrase, "all but the worst of buddies. . . , " it's a phrase I agree with. All but the worst of buddies is better than no buddy. I have never found a good reason to solo dive, although before my "conversion" on this subject, I certainly did it many times. But the close calls I had when doing so were even more evidence for me that solo diving is stupid, under almost all conditions. I think solo diving is one of the last bastions of the macho diver mentality that can no longer justify diving deep on air, and with more and more hordes of ill-trained tech divers out there also wearing the cool gear and doing the "big" dives, diving solo offers the testosterone-laden tough guy one more distinction from the "average" diver. I'm sure you'll be safe on every solo dive you make too -- until you aren't. JoeL -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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