Posted 02 August 2009 - 05:37 PM
Great questions, and a great topic! Those who were around last year when I joined know my story, but I'm going to write this for members who don't know me, or who join in the future.
I joined SD in June 2008 when my marriage started falling apart and I lost the only dive buddy I had ever had - my husband. I had fallen in love with diving and did not want to give it up, and my local dive shop does not travel much and there is no local diving to speak of around Kansas City, so I went looking for an alternative and I found SingleDivers.com. Finding out that it was also for "married but buddyless" divers made me feel OK about joining, since I was technically still married but was no longer vacationing with him.
I liked the feel of the site, and the friendly welcomes I received when I posted my introduction. I delved into the old threads and read a lot, and learned about what SD was about and about some of the "main players" of SD. A very short time later, I signed up for the Roatan trip over Labor Day 2008, and started participating on the site, and in particular following the Roatan trip thread, where questions were asked by others and answered, so I learned.
When my husband moved out and I asked for coping help, the outpouring of kindness & concern from the SD members towards a complete stranger was overwhelming and awe-inspiring, and it cemented my connection with this club.
I'm an experienced traveler, so getting myself somewhere is never an issue for me. ScubaPunk is right, because most of us will meet up with another SD member at an airport somewhere along the route. It's nice to get to know some fellow divers before you even get to the island! When I arrived in Roatan, there was a wide variety of people to meet....some younger and some older; some very experienced divers and some brand new; some shy and some very outgoing; you get the picture! But a strange thing happens when divers get together.....the outgoing ones draw the shy ones into conversations, the experienced divers start talking to the newer divers about diving & giving pointers, and before we knew it, we found that we had things in common besides diving and we were laughing & having a good time. There were no cliques of people hanging out with just each other. If anybody had a problem with their roommate or assigned dive buddy, it was handled quietly and professionally, without the rest of the group knowing about it. Everybody seems comfortable with everyone else's marital status, even when couples come on the trip.
I have to admit that even though my first assigned dive buddy was in a DiveMaster program on Utila so I figured he had some good diving skills, I was still a bit nervous the first day about diving with someone new to me. By the end of that trip, I had been buddied up with several different people and I was fine with it. I have since improved my own diving skills and have gone on 3 SD trips, so I'm comfortable diving with any recreational diver who shows they're a safe and considerate dive buddy. If any of the divers would ever show unsafe diving practices, I'm confident that it would be addressed, also quietly and professionally. There is usually more than one DiveMaster on the trip, plus whatever DM the dive operation provides. That's a lot of DM's in the water with us!
The trip survey helps the trip coordinators match you up with similar roommates and dive buddies. It's not perfect, but thankfully most of us are there to dive and don't mind being flexible if a change is needed. Some drink more than others, but it's ALWAYS after the diving is done for the day, and I have yet to see someone with a bad hangover try to dive the next morning.....it just hasn't happened on the trips I've been on. In fact, WW has a pretty hard-and-fast rule.....when you pick up a drink with alcohol in it, your diving is done for the day!
The SD.com Angels & Charlies group is here to help new members sign up for a trip, so if anybody is intimidated by the trip sign-up process (and yes, it CAN be intimidating!) then all they have to do is send an email to Angels@singledivers.com or to Charlies@singledivers.com and one of us will be their trip-sign-up buddy. We will answer any question they have about the sign-up process, get them their Survey & Waiver to fill out, make sure they know how to get payment submitted, and if we can't answer all their questions about the trip itself, we know who can help with that. If you get me, I'll ask for your phone number and I'll call to help walk you through the process if you like.
As usual, I've used 1,000 words where 100 would probably have been enough......but hopefully I've answered some questions that some SD members who have not been on a trip yet may have.
Just kidding, she was a great roommate. We were in a condo with maybe 3 or 4 rooms at Buddy Dive so we had 6 or 8 women in the condo. Everyone was very friendly, the dive op was great, I learned to shore dive after getting beat up a couple of times on the rocks! Don't ask me how, but this group always manages to find each other at the airports, with or without the SD T-shirts! Aside from the diving, most will agree that the People are the best thing about SD. We are not a certain type of people, we are all very, very, very different! That's just one of the things I think make it so great. 
