The Ultimate Dive Buddy
There's a rule in scuba diving, drilled into every open-water student before they ever touch the water: never dive alone. You dive with a buddy. You watch their air, they watch yours. It's a simple rule that becomes something much deeper the first time you're thirty feet down and you realize how much trust it actually requires.
I learned how deep that bond sometimes comes with a man I'll just call H.
I was the captain of H's yacht for almost five years, and in that stretch, our working relationship became something else too, thanks to our shared love of diving. H loved sailing and diving in a way people do when it's less a hobby and more a piece of their identity. Before I came aboard, he'd had a stroke. He came through it well, all things considered — sharp as ever, walking with just a slight limp, living his life. But the stroke had left its fingerprints on him in small, stubborn ways.
We found out exactly how much on our first dive together in the Caribbean.
We took the tender over to a shallow sandy spot with about 15' of water and H geared up like he'd done hundreds of times before. But as soon as we were in the water, two things became immediately apparent. He couldn't kick both legs with equal strength, so instead of swimming in a straight line, he'd curve off to one side, correcting, overcorrecting, drifting again. And his buoyancy control — the constant art of staying neutral in the water column — kept slipping away from him. He'd sink to the bottom, push air into his BC, shoot up to the surface, blow his BC and sink to the bottom again. His stroke hadn't taken much from him but it seemed it had taken his ability to dive. You could see him doing the math on it, right there in the water.
Having listened to him talk about his anticipation of diving for the last few months, I wasn't ready to let that be the answer. So I swam over, tugged on his BC and made a cutting motion to let him know not to change it. I grabbed the valve on the top of his tank and started to use my own BC to manage buoyancy for both of us. And I started to do the swimming — for both of us. He wouldn't need to correct a drifting line or fight to stay level. He could just be underwater again, the way he used to be.
It worked. Not just worked — it became our thing. For almost five years after that, this was simply how H and I dove. I'd hold his tank, control our depth, and steer us wherever the reef or the wall or the wreck wanted to take us. If he spotted something — a turtle, a morey eel tucked in the rocks, a wall of silver fish catching the light — he'd point, and I'd bank us over toward it like we were one diver instead of two. We kept it shallow, mostly forty to fifty feet, easy dives with easy currents, which suited us both fine. We weren't chasing depth records. We just enjoyed the freedom of the water.
Jamaica gave us some of our best dives. Guadeloupe gave us a few of our favorites, including one afternoon we finned over to the underwater statue of Jacques Cousteau, hovering there together in the still way divers do, while someone snapped a photo of the two of us next to Jacques.
People talk about scuba diving as a solo sport with a safety buddy tacked on. Sometimes that's not quite right. Down there, you genuinely need each other — and somewhere between his tank valve and my BC, H and I found a version of dive buddies that outlasted any dive log. It's still some of the best memories I have of diving and of him.