Bob, as a new diver, your idea of planning and mine are the same. After going through my recent certification class, planning is one of the things that they preached. However, I have made 8 dives thus far, and since I was diving with much more experienced divers, we really never came up with good dive plans. It was mostly "lets go to the fire truck, then to the airplane, then to the boat". By that time, I was almost out of air (i.e. just below 500#) and felt that I should have prepared even better.

In my work environment, I am a senior reactor operator at a nuclear power plant. Every job we do, every work week we execute, is planned down to the Nth degree. We always preach "plan the schedule, execute the plan". We also make safety our number one priority and in an industrial environment, that is extremely important. This is my idea of how diving should be. While it should mostly be fun, there is a certain safety aspect and protocol that must be followed.

On my future dives, no matter how much of a pain, I will plan my dives and dive my plan, ensuring the safety protocols are followed. I know I will feel much better if my buddy and I are safe throughout the dive. As we used to say on board our submarines (back in my navy days), "keep the surface-to-dive ratio at one".

Thanks for the advice.