The survey is a team operation, and no diver is ever separated from a buddy. The rule that frames everything in the water: each diver stays within reach of a buddy — close enough to give immediate help or share air — with the Team moving as a unit. Where a procedure requires separation to a distance, it is the Teams that separate, never the divers within them: each Team is an intact buddy pair, so every diver always has a buddy within reach. In calibration, Team A holds the marker while Team B moves out together to read the fade; the Teams separate to visibility distance, but each diver stays beside their own buddy. The instructor sets the team structure to suit the conditions, never in a way that leaves a diver out of reach of a buddy. No station, no count, no capture is worth a diver out of reach of a buddy.
The two roles, and the swap. At each station the pair divides the work. One diver is the photographer and station-keeper: holding a stable, neutral, no-contact position and taking the panorama. The other is the recorder: keeping the in-water tally, watching the team's position, and minding the gas. Splitting the work this way keeps either diver from being overloaded — one attends to the capture, the other to the situation. The pair swaps roles between dives so that both practice each, and both can run either side of the survey. One priority within the recorder's job is fixed: position, buddy contact, gas, and navigation come first, and the in-water tally waits whenever any of them needs attention. The count that carries the most weight is the topside one made from the image (Module 5); the in-water tally is the cross-check against it — the second observer, not the primary count (Appendix A.5) — so it is never a reason to let the watch slip.
Moving as a unit. The pair swims the ring together, not strung out across it. While the photographer works a station, the recorder stays within reach and watches, holding position slightly above the camera's horizontal field so the capture stays clear; the pair confirms the station is done and moves to the next center together, on the planned heading. A team that fragments under task load is the failure this guards against — so who leads each leg, how the pair stays in contact, and how they confirm each station are settled in planning (Skill Session 1), not improvised at depth.
Communication. The hand signals are agreed before the dive: station reached, capture taken, count complete, ready to move, gas check, turn-around, a problem. A shared signal set is part of the shared plan; a signal invented underwater is a signal half-understood.
Gas as a team rule. The survey turns on the more conservative of the two divers' gas — never pushing one diver's reserve to finish the ring. Gas and no-decompression time are both hard limits of these dives, and either can be the first reached (Section One). In the absence of other factors — a stronger current, a heavier-breathing team member, or a stricter agency or reserve requirement — the rule of thirds (a third out, a third back, a third held in reserve) is the recommended default, the reserve third being the margin the survey's elevated task-load consumption (camera, buoyancy, compass, and kicks all at once) calls for. Agency gas-planning standards govern wherever they are stricter. At the planned turn pressure the survey stops where it is, the partial ring is recorded as partial, and the team ascends. Gas always wins.
Task loading, and why the plan is built dry. A survey asks a diver to manage buoyancy, navigation, the camera, the count, the buddy, and the gas at once. That is a heavy load, and load is where mistakes happen. The course manages it by moving work off the dive: the plan and the arithmetic are built and rehearsed on the surface (Skill Session 1), so that underwater the diver executes a plan already known; and the demanding work of identification and counting is moved topside, after the dive (Module 5). What remains underwater is what must be done there — position, capture, and team — and nothing more.
Human factors — the shared mental model. The deeper lesson under all of this is that the dive's safety and quality rest on a shared mental model: both divers and the surface watch holding the same picture of the plan — the hub, north, the heading sequence, the roles, the gas plan, the contingencies. A plan held by one diver is not a team plan. Building and checking that shared model is the purpose of the briefing; reviewing how it held is the purpose of the debrief. Divers who have completed HFiD: Essentials (The Human Diver) will recognize this — the shared mental model, the briefing and debriefing discipline, the willingness of any team member to call a stop. The Human Diver's briefing and debriefing Wetnotes are a useful template, and the human-factors foundation HFiD provides is why it is the recommended prerequisite for this specialty.