Buddy System

[Iain3]

I also wonder just how useful a buddy is. I know there are a lot of cases where a buddy has saved a diver but there must be an awful lot where it hasn't made any difference. If you accept that there are situations likely enough where a buddy is the difference between life and death then don't you also need to accept that the diving you are doing is too dangerous? Having a buddy save you is not the same thing as making the dive safe.

I can recall a few cases where a buddy has died trying to save a diver, often where the diver being saved survives.

I think in CCR particularly there is very good grounds to use a buddy if one is available. With a little bit of complacency (which anyone can be guilty of on occaision) your unit can render you powerless to save yourself, in these scenarios you need a buddy or a lot of luck, without one redundancy won't help.

My usual buddy is tiny and tends to crawl through holes I can't fit through, on one occaision leaving him in a silted out wreck and me stuck under it crawling around in the silt in about two square meters of space I was sharing with a massive carpet shark at least twice my size, so he can be a liability but I'd still always choose to dive with him if I could.