102. Understanding the risk envelope

For many decades the buddy system has been the underpinning of recreational scuba diving. However bottle diving is not a gregarious sport, and it is a lucky mudplugger indeed who can find a kindred soul to grope bottom with, no matter how much they lay on the charisma. So how about diving alone?

In recent years the matter of solo diving has been broached in scuba diving circles and there are now training courses for it, although it remains a highly controversial practice. The core argument against solo diving is essentially this: it removes the possibility of someone assisting you in an emergency. Diving with a buddy provides you with a kind of safety net. There are numerous examples of lives being saved through the presence of a buddy, and therefore, the argument runs, it is foolish to dive alone.

I have been solo diving for a few years now, mostly in pursuit of bottles, and I have naturally given a great deal of thought to this matter. I have to say that I don't agree with the above line of reasoning at all. The problem is that it is betrayed by its own implication, i.e. that you can afford to play it a bit faster and looser if someone else is assigned to bail you out of trouble. This matter can only be rationalised if safety is seen as an envelope, the parameters of which are adjustable depending upon the interplay of various conditions, including the presence or absence of other team members. An absolutist philosophy on buddy diving rides roughshod over this, even to the point that if you can't find (or be assigned) some sort of warm body to accompany you on a dive, then your dive must be vetoed altogether. There are plenty of dive operators who apply the latter principle, and the inanity of such situations has been widely criticised.

I am not presenting this as a condemnation of the buddy system. If you want to go to a hundred feet or more, and explore a wreck in only one or two dives, then the presence of a reliable buddy can indeed allow you to achieve that goal. It is a fair and reasonable criterion for defining a safety envelope suitable for that type of dive. As a solo bottle diver though, I would never contemplate such a thing in a million years. For me anything more than fifteen feet is deep, thirty feet is very deep, and if I cover more than twenty metres along the bottom in one dive then that counts as very rapid progress indeed.

What I am saying is that buddy diving and solo diving have quite different rationales, and very different safety envelopes to go with them. If you try and apply the envelope from one system onto another then you are diving dangerously. However, if you respect the different goals and parameters of solo and buddy diving, and do not confuse them, then you can dive safely.

One very significant hazard that solo diving eliminates is peer pressure. The closest scrape I have ever got myself into was due to peer pressure. That's what persuaded me to retire from buddy diving and start bimbling about on my own for bottles, with no-one other than myself to set the agenda.