We are fortunate to meet interesting people from all over the world. Among them are people with no spearfishing experience, but also professionals. People that are famous and people that are not. People financially free and people that have saved months to join us on a trip. Whoever you are… when you go out freediving with us, we will talk about freediving safety and you will have to accept our buddy system supervision.
You only live once. At least that is what we believe. So we take your safety very seriously. We are all FII certified freedivers and have many years of freediving experience, “been there, done that”.
Our safety track record is clean. In six years we have done spearfishing and freediving charters, we have had zero accidents. As well as zero blacking outs among our guests.
Basically, the buddy system or buddy supervision is a safety net. It is a misunderstanding to think that this freediving system itself makes your freediving safe. The one that makes it safe or not is yourself. Let me explain. The buddy system means “1 up, 1 down”. So while you dive down, your buddy will be watching you and monitoring you all the time. When your buddy is back on the surface, you wait a couple of seconds to make sure your buddy is ok, then it is your time to dive down, and then your buddy will be watching you. So it’s your own decision when to go down, what to do underwater and when to go up.
That is the theory. In reality, it is not always like that. We hear a lot “oooh I always go out by myself”, “my buddy was already on the boat”, etc. By the way check out your possible new buddy: Terry Maas´recovery vest…
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Last week we went out spearfishing in Cozumel in a new area with lots of current. In total there were four hunters and we were diving in the 60 to 80ft area. We divided the group of four into two teams. One of the divers shot a good Grouper at about 75ft of depth, but there was no way to fight it up to the surface. The Grouper made it to a cave even 10ft deeper… The Riffe 3atm float got dragged down because of the current. Diver came safely up and in the meantime, the current had taken us far from the Grouper spot.
At that point we decided to get back on the boat, drive back and jump in again; Team One goes a bit ahead. Team Two jumps in later and we all freedive in buddy system to try to get the Grouper out. We all did deep dives in strong currents, and took more and more time in between dives. We repeated this procedure for half an hour. We succeeded and this Grouper tasted better than any other Grouper we ever ate.
This was a fresh food obtained by a team. An example of freediving safety. Without Buddy System Supervision, it would have been impossible to get this fish up without a risk of accidents. Be safe!
Leo