For your first 5-10 dives, ask if you can team with the divemaster as a dive
buddy. By then should be comfortable enough to dive with most people.
Congrats on the O/W cert and your cujones to get it in Alaskan waters. Have
a great trip!

---------------------------------------------------------
 Steve:
 It's good that you are thinking of situations to come. The mere fact that
you are aware that you could be a problem to someone else is a good
indication that you are in the learning mode and therefore going to be less
of a problem. Make sense?
   If you are scheduled to do all this diving, and somewhere in the mix you
are doing an Advanced Open Water type of course, then I would suggest that
you do the Advanced course first. There are a couple of reasons for this:
1) you get further training
2)your dives will, of necessity, be with an instructor, thereby decreasing
your apprehension while upgrading your experience and skill level.
3) the Advanced course will most likely be on the same type of dives that
you will be wanting to do later on so you will see what is going on, meet
some people, and find out that most people who dive are not Water Gods. They
are merely people (like you) who think cruising around underwater is a fun
thing to do.
   Being in water that has temperatures approaching 20 degrees C will also
be a big help to you. There is something about jumping into not-warm water
that reduces the fun factor.
   Relax....and use your head. You will be fine. Every single person going
under the water has been where you are. Be honest about your skill level and
you will find that most divers will go out of their way to lend you a hand.
   Have a great trip.
   Bob

Talk to the DM in advance, expressing your preference for somebody of
comparable skill or, failing that, somebody that does not mind accompanying
a relative newbie.  Expect that an experienced diver may not want to be
paired with you on every dive, but may not mind at all for relatively
unchallanging dives.  If there's nobody else, talk to the DM about being his
buddy.

Talk about this one in advance too.  There may be options for different size
tanks or you may find somebody that's comfortable with your ascending alone,
assuming, of course, that you're comfortable with this.  If you're not, say
so in advance.  Do not exceed your comfort level just to keep from
inconveniencing somebody else.  Stretch your limits a bit if you like, but
only because you wish to expand them, not because you think somebody else
will be less inconvenienced.  Trust me, nothing is as inconvenient as a
diver who has exceeded his limits and paid the price.

8^) First you're worried about somebody more experienced.  Now you're worred
about somebody unsafe.  This one is actually easier.  Don't accept a buddy
you think is unsafe.

Depends on what you mean.  If you think they're unsafe. don't dive with
them.  If you think you'll not get along, ask for somebody else, but be
prepared to accept some inconvenience.  After all, you came without a buddy
too.

Report them to the DM . . . if you survive.

Nobody can tell you what to do in every situation.   You're qualified to
dive and, if you can dive in Alaska, you're going to find diving in
Australia, at least in the warmer portions of Australia, to be easier and
safer.  Use your head, think about the risks you are taking and stick with
what you are comfortable with.  Be open and honest with the operator and DM.
When you've done a couple thousand dives, as several people in this group
have, the advice will be much the same, but the diving will be a bit
different . . . probably.

Do the best you can.  That's all anybody can ask.

Here's some advice.  Don't use your official e-mail address for newsgroup
messages.  The odds of getting hundreds of advertisements, including porno,
is too high and, as a fellow government employee, I can assure you that your
office will not appreciate porn or viruses.

Lee

"Steve Wilbur" wrote...

Wow! A month diving here, you'll get to see a good diversity of our marine
life in that time.
Where will you be diving while you're here?

Depending on the boats, but I certainly don't think so.
In the touristy areas, a lot of the people on the liveaboards are there
doing their OW themselves.

Someone super-experienced is usually going to bring their own buddy, or will
sort out with the boat staff that they don't get "lumped" with a newbie if
that's how they feel.

I'm not sure where you're diving or what your current air consumption rates
are, but in all honesty, in most places you're likely to visit your times
will be limited by the dive staff and you won't have to worry much about air
consumption rates. EG you'll all be given a dive time of 45 mins, and you're
likely to be able to last that long on your single. At least, in the warm
clear waters of the GBR you should be able to... the diving's not very deep.

That one's easy... pull the dive staff aside and tell them you're not
comfortable with your assigned buddy and you'd prefer to team up with
another buddy pair. Happens all the time, and we're more than happy to
shuffle pairs around when required.

A couple of other things to remember... are you bringing your own
regs/computer or hiring while over here? Just remember we work in metrics,
and I'm not sure about all the boats you're going to be going on, but we
usually brief the punters in metric - that is, max depth in metres, tanks in
litres, and min air remaining in bar.

In Queensland your diving will be fairly regulated, again depending on the
boats you use, but we have some pretty strict regulations for diving in this
state. Some dive staff have been known to ask to actually view your computer
for post-dive depth/time info (not trusting their punters to provide
truthful information), and some will even go so far as to ban reverse
profiles and will keep you out of the water for 6 hours if you dare to dive
a reverse profile. (Reverse profiles are where dive 2 is deeper than dive 1,
and were previously thought to have been evocotive profiles for DCS, but
they've since been proven to be fairly safe). The rest of our Qld
regulations probably won't affect you as a tourist diver... oh, except that
you'll need cylumes for night dives, and it'll be cheaper to pick these up
from a hardware store on land before getting on the boats, or buy a
battery-powered strobe that'll last a lot longer.

If you're after any tips on East Coast diving or operators, drop me a line.

Ness
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What lies at the bottom of the ocean and twitches?
A nervous wreck.