Freediving Fins

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As mentioned, we offer a variety of fins using different materials which results in a large variation in price.

As usual there is a variety of opinions, but the scuba divers who use “long fins” or freedive fins tend to be pretty big fans of them. Of course they have negatives in that they are more cumbersome on the boat for the 60 seconds (before you splash) and their length would make turning around in a tight silty shipwreck more of a challenge. However, once in the water they have excellent efficiency and more than enough power.

A couple of comments were made about the vulnerability of fiberglass and carbon fiber to damage. In the past, carbon fiber blades especially have had a history of fragility. However, I think all modern fins being manufactured now are pretty robust.

No matter how strong you are or how hard you kick, it is EXTREMELY unlikely that you will damage one of our fin blades. Before we stock a particular fin, we literally try to crack them or break them by kicking as hard as possible during testing. We test them with scuba and freediving and they also have to be tested in a mechanical bending machine that delivers many thousands of cycles. They all are pretty tough and handle the normal stresses of swimming extremely well.

In general, you probably want to avoid a giant stride entry, because with the large blade area, the trailing fin puts a ton of stress at the toe of the footpocket. A diver can enter with their feet together and enter heel first, or roll to side or do a back roll or even land backwards.

Polymer (plastic), fiberglass and carbon fiber can handle many, many dives and kick cycles. What the blades can not handle well is abuse. If someone drops a tank on the blade, or slams a heavy weight on the very tip of the blade or closes a hatch cover on the tip, then a crack or damage can occur. This seems obvious, but it should also be mentioned that the long fins should not be thrown on the deck and then walked on by other people. If the diver treats the fins with just a little bit of respect, they should last years of hard service.

Scuba diving involves heavy tanks, often hard weights and sometime rough conditions and gear can get abused. Many scuba divers are more comfortable using a pair of inexpensive polymer fins in this environment compared to a $500 pair of carbons from another manufacturer. Ours are much less expensive BTW.

In general, fiberglass and carbon fiber blades have better performance with respect to converting the energy from the divers kick to moving the diver, however to be honest, most scuba divers are not so attuned to getting 100% performance that they will be fine with an inexpensive polymer blade. They will generally recognize a SIGNIFICANT improvement compared to their typical scuba fin.

For freedivers, who measure their time underwater in seconds, a small improvement in efficiency can be very important.

Hopefully I have not diverged too far off topic, but I wanted to emphasize that a scuba diver who can afford a more expensive freedive fin, should not be hesitant to buy a higher performance fin because of excessive concerns over the robustness of the blade.

Thanks!

dano
 
I feel a lot more control with full foot fins, and the long ones allow me to just glide.
Most people assume that open foot pockets are just those large and rigid employed with heavy boots, such as the Jet Fins, providing little control and inefficient kicking. And that efficient freediving fins are only with close full feet pocket.
In reality athletes doing finswimming competitions and freediving recordmen use almost always fins equipped with open feet pockets, such as these ones:
A.Stadiotti.jpg

This kind of fins are not to be used with booths, they lock to the feet much better than standard closed shoes, of course must be of the exact size and fit for your feet, and provide maximum thrust with minimal mechanical losses.
And obviously a monofin, as in the picture above, exceeds the performances of any pair of separate fins.
Coming back to scuba diving with long, efficient fins: some makers produce long fins specially designed for fast scuba diving (a speciality called "underwater velocity"): the cylinder is forward-mounted, as shown here below, and this is the setup ensuring maximum speed and the capability to swim against very strong current.
finaleger.jpg
 
Can you describe or show what you mean by horizontal scissor kick?
I did already explain this technique in another thread (about breathing control). See here and in the following pages...
Breathing technique
 
Same. I've never been stopped or had any issues (same goes for skateboards, which I also hand carry).

OP: If you don't know for sure that you want carbon fiber (they are expensive and fragile, but imo worth the money once you get used to using them without kicking them together) you can go with plastic fins - Beuchat Mundial's are pretty forgiving of the learning process, and I've had good experience with the Bare predator fins as well. Also as was already linked, Mako has nice fins that are more durable than the carbon fiber models.

Another thing to consider is what stiffness you want, as carbon fins come in a variety of stiffness levels- a lot of freedivers are going more and more towards soft or really soft blades, but for moving scuba gear and playing in currents I'd probably suggest a medium stiffness fin. I haven't tried an actual stiff blade so I can't comment on how well that level would work but I've heard they wear people out a lot faster unless you have serious leg muscles.
Thanks for this info! I will definitely be going with medium stiffness since I will use them for Scuba.
 
I feel a lot more control with fool foot fins, and the long ones allow me to just glide.

Using the long fins is just a natural progression, I started with normal size fool foot, then before I realize that the "industry" was full of it I moved to the open heel, because "real" divers use open heel.... quickly placed the jets on a shelf and moved on to the mares quattro, after wearing out a few pares I discovered the Deep Apnea and just love everything about them, my husband uses something similar from a local store.

These days with water temps in the mid 70'sF I wish my neoprene socks were a bit warmer but there's no way I go back to open heel ever.

The pic is a rare instance of me without the mask on my forehead but that was just seconds before splashing. it does show a decent view of the fins
Deep Apnea Free Diving Fins made in U.S.A.
These look pretty appealing for Scuba.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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