Hi Loredana,

I think you're absolutely right in that there is a very strong temptation for DIR divers to regard all other divers as somehow worse. Goodness knows it's a trap I've fallen into many times! It's so easy to get sold on the mantra that prone trim makes the perfect diver, or that anything other than DIR diving is unsafe. I suspect there's a niggling voice that justifies such views from the DIR point of view in that horizontal trim CAN make diving easier, and that an honest assessment of whether you're prepared for a dive CAN result in safer diving.

Two things I find help combat this for me: an honest look at my own opinions, assessing whether they're reasonable, only the view of a perfectionist, or plain incorrect, and keeping a broad social group with people diving in many ways and at many levels of commitment. I think the recent threads John started have had some extremely insightful views on both sides of this, and have certainly made me re-evaluate what I think.

Whether this is any help to you, I don't know. Do you have any good friends who dive, DIR or otherwise, who it would be FUN to have a shallow 6m afternoon dive with just for the sake of sharing a dive? If it's the kind of dive you'd take a complete newbie diving friend into, perhaps just swimming pool depths, purely to have fun and watch fish?

If you're needing to keep working on tech 1 skills, perhaps look for people who wouldn't mind you taking a little bit of time through the dive to work on skills and who could be primed to do things like indicating how trim and knees were looking, or who could throw OOA drills at you as complete surprises for you to respond to? I've certainly had a few 'eureka!' moments recently diving with complete novices who unconsciously emulate my diving and show glaringly obviously when I'm doing something wrong, almost better than a video camera. It adds to the fun when you have someone to laugh about it with later :-)

I do love meeting, diving, and socialising with other enthusiastic DIR divers (the group from the board here, I'm discovering, are in general GREAT fun, and very tolerant!) but I find it a fun change sometimes to dive with good friends who have no idea there's anything but 'going diving', don't care what kit I'm wearing, and are very conscientious buddies and dive safely within their limits. Where it's immensely rewarding for me is when they come back to me later having seen how I dive and say 'show me how to do that?' and I can pass on a little of what I've been taught. I've gained a great deal of pleasure from diving with their sense of fun and simplicity, they've found out about something fun and new.

If I'm missing the point of your post and approaching this from completely the wrong direction please do follow up with more thoughts.

Tim