Sad to say I saw a lone male attempt to enter a ferry channel for a recreational scuba dive with no dive flag and no buddy this morning while out detecting. If you are anything like me and eyeing up a Nokta Pulsedive don’t make diving and hunting solitary or anything like that Darwin award.
Diving with buddies in Canterbury is like diving alone 
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That doesn’t sound positive for your buddies.
Guess what I’m trying to say is the visibility is pretty crap most of the time. Very easy to lose sight of each other.
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I always have gone scuba diving alone, with complete redundant system, know your limits, don’t enter caves for crays & always have a pre thought out plan if SHTF.
I always make sure ive got someone in the boat who knows how to drive it and pick me up, i often dive alone , same deal no caves , tight spots i carry a knife and have an alarm on my bcd if i need to alert boatman , also got dive sausage and will never empty a tank always got atleast 5o bar
Dive sausage isn’t any good in windy conditions, but a whistle might just save the day. 1st hand experience.
In 15yrs I’ve only had a handful of boat dives, I’m mainly a shore diver. My buddie is usually my wife freaking out on the beach lol. Knife absolutely essential…those set nets are virtually invisible underwater.
I think many people dive solo, just that few admit it.
I do solo remote area kayaking. I also shore dive solo (although usually just detecting these days). I have paddled and dived with buddies many times and have found that very often risk shift is an inherent weakness in the system when partnered up.
If you have the skills, redundancies (and well maintained kit), increase the safety margins and take responsibilty for yourself then I am certainly not going to pan someone for solo.
This is an interesting lecture:
Coming Out of the Closet
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I actually feel safer out in a boat , less likely to come up in whitewater ,or the current issue I .I don’t like diving around seal colonies , I feel like part of the food chain anyway, but have had 2 bad experiences shore diving
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Can’t beat a boat dive, so calm & quiet with that extra depth plus so much easier, I’m shattered after a shore dive. Probably why I haven’t been out for a couple years, happy snorkeling around with a speargun these days.
In a past life I was the president of a dive club down south. The rule was no-one dives solo and only once did I have to pull someone up for that, an old boy who dived with Jacques Cousteau and was allegedly the 13th registered/certified diver in the world. It only took a formal discussion of excluding him from the club that he started to behave…
I know it is relatively safe to dive alone, but I don’t simply for my kids sake. Oh and my wife wouldnt let me either…
Where down south were you. I think my uncle was a foundation member of the Otago club.
It was the Otago University Dive Club, and my solo-diving legend hailed from Brussels.
If you could dive in Otago, you could dive anywhere in the world he said
There must have been two clubs i Dunedin then as he was a member of a club, called I think, The Otago Underwater Diving Club’ - possibly 1960 or thereabout because he was diving on the Tyrone or boat tender there and dived for gold in Central Otago at the beginning of the 1960s. I knew a guy who was diving at the heads and he got monstered by a shark - that was about 1968, another guy ran out of air exploring the ship wrecks at the Mole.
Yes the old steel barge seaward of the Mokia and Moana wrecks…the story was the bubbles rising displaced and suspended the rust particles from the ceiling and vis was zero
Totally agree Mudwiggle,you cannot simply relying on your dive buddy for safety,you can often be separated and out of site(even by a matter of meters) and your on your own,often the only one responsible for getting in and out of sticky situations is yourself.
You have to learn-
-get familiar with and maintain your equipment
-practice your bail out plan(retrieve knife,ditch weight belt,cut lines and hoses if need be)
-keep good level of fitness(Iv’e had 3 mates in 5 years die from heart issues while diving)
-keep calm…panic will kill you.
-dive to the conditions and your ability level
If that doesn’t get you then the huge Mako’s off the east coast will…lol!
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