I used to gear up too quickly. Once the boat was on site or we were standing at the water's edge, I wanted to be ready and get in. At the time I mostly attributed it to excitement. I liked diving, I was eager to start the dive, and standing around in gear felt like time spent waiting for the thing I had come there to do. With more experience, I have become less charitable about it. A lot of what I considered enthusiasm was simply impatience, and it contributed to mistakes that were entirely avoidable.
I once jumped off a boat without connecting the low-pressure inflator hose to my BCD. On another dive, I had been messing with one of my second stages before getting in and had not screwed it back onto the hose properly. It came apart because I had failed to go back and check my own work. Neither incident became particularly consequential, but both should have been caught before I entered the water. I have also rushed in ways that affected someone other than me. On one occasion, I started asking questions of a buddy while he was pre-breathing his rebreather. The questions could have waited. He was in the middle of a specific procedure that deserved his full attention, and I interrupted it because I was already thinking about getting the dive underway.
After a while, I began noticing the same behavior around me. Divers would hurry through assembly and leave something disconnected, discover a valve problem after they had already put everything on, or realize at the last minute that a computer was not configured the way they expected. On hot days, someone would climb into a drysuit too early and then become increasingly uncomfortable while the rest of the group prepared, which only gave them another reason to hurry. None of these situations was especially unusual. That was what made the pattern interesting. The mistakes were generally mundane, and so was the behavior that preceded them.
One of my instructors once called me an otter. It was less a nickname than an observation about the way I naturally operate. I move quickly, bounce between things, and have a tendency to get ahead of whatever I am doing. That can be useful elsewhere, but it is something I have had to actively manage in diving. I am still perfectly capable of rushing through a setup if I let myself. Experience has not removed the tendency. It has mostly taught me to recognize it sooner.
These days I try to make gearing up deliberately uneventful. I assemble everything without much concern for whether I am the first person ready. I check connections rather than relying on the fact that I remember making them. If something does not look or feel right, I deal with it while I am still standing somewhere convenient to deal with it. I would rather spend another minute beside the truck, on the dock, or sitting on the boat than discover after entry that I carried an easily detectable problem into the water with me.
I have become equally conscious of how I behave when someone else is getting ready. I do not want a buddy speeding through a check because I am standing there in full gear looking impatient, nor do I want to interrupt someone who is working through a procedure that requires concentration. Sometimes that means doing nothing for a few minutes. If my buddy needs to adjust something, run through a checklist again, or simply take more time than I did, then I can wait. I want the way I speak and behave to make that obvious.
There are circumstances in diving when time genuinely matters, but ordinary preparation for a recreational dive is rarely improved by manufacturing urgency. The boat will still be there. The quarry, lake, ocean, or river certainly will. If a few extra minutes on the surface are enough to materially affect the dive plan, that is usually something worth recognizing before anyone gets in.
I still get excited when it is time to dive, and I still have the same instinct to get my gear on and head for the water. I have just learned not to indulge it. There is enough opportunity underwater for something unexpected to happen without bringing along a problem I could have found while I was still standing on the surface.
