Hey all, I was raised in the tropics and have just moved to Naples Fl. We called "snorkeling" freediving where I come from so I was curious what the proper American distinction is? [facebook] Gavin Verth
A very interesting question. The term "freediving" has changed its meaning over the years. In the 1950s, several books appeared with "free diving" in the title. Not only did they fully cover the topic of what we now call scuba diving, i.e. diving with air tanks, but very few of their pages were devoted to breath-hold underwater swimming. The authors of these tomes borrowed the term "free diving" from the expression "plongée libre", which the French coined to describe the activity of diving unencumbered by the surface-supplied hoses, brass helmets, heavy canvas suits and lead-soled boots worn by standard divers.
The term "free diving" changed its meaning in the 1960s and 1970s when Jacques Mayol et al. performed superhuman feats to break depth records in the field of diving on a single breath. In the popular imagination, freediving is a competitive sport still associated with breaking breathhold underwater records. Freedivers tend to use a rather narrow range of underwater swimming gear, including low-volume masks, long-bladed plastic fins and wetsuits so body-gripping that they have to be donned with the aid of plastic bags over hands and feet. On online forums, freedivers tend to focus on how far they can dive below the surface on a single breath. They practise training techniques to extend their breathholding skills.
Freedivers will often claim that anybody dipping below the surface while swimming is technically freediving. Snorkelling, however, is about more than the occasional jack-knife dive below the surface. Snorkellers spend a lot of their time floating and swimming on the surface looking down. European snorkellers also have the option of "swimtrekking"
SWIMTREKKING - Nuotando il mare
using fins, masks and snorkels to get from A to B using the open waters of lakes, rivers and seas. So, unlike freedivers, snorkellers do routinely cross open water as well as making shallow dives underneath it. For that reason, I think there is a useful distinction to be maintained between snorkelling and freediving. On the equipment side, I find snorkelling to be much less prescriptive, and proscriptive, than freediving. When I snorkelled at La Jolla Cove several years ago, the snorkellers there wore every kind of fins, masks and snorkels. The one thing they all had in common was their enjoyment of the experience.
I've been a snorkeller, not a freediver, for fifty years and I'm happy to remain so. The name accurately describes the gentle exercise I take when I snorkel in the early morning off a sandy North Sea beach in the North East of England. The water I swim in rarely exceeds 10 feet in depth, so there's no danger of me attempting to break any freediving depth records. I try and spend an hour in the sea and the activity is much more akin to open-water swimming than freediving. I'm happy to swim with traditional standard-bladed full-foot fins and classic oval masks. As for staying warm, I keep my plastic bags strictly for supermarket shopping. I use a vintage 1950s-style valve-less drysuit which can be worn over different thicknesses of underclothing and which doesn't restrict my movements as I swim.
