Question about swimming ability

[plot]

I don't think "confident in the water" and "good swimmer" are necessarily related. A person can easily be a great swimmer, but afraid to leave the swimming pool were they can see the bottom. Once they get into those deeper areas, they might get very uncomfortable and nervous... and visa versa. Someone that can barely swim might be perfectly comfortable sitting in the water (I know I am).

 

[Dreadnaught]

Hmmmmm....Not sure if I follow your reasoning plot. Could you please give me a hit of whatever you are smoking?<G>

 

[SNorman]

So, at any point in an emergency situation does your wetsuit, fins, or BCD fling themselves off your body? If not, the difference between being able to swim 100 meters or 10,000 meters with no equipment seems to be irrelavent. Sheesh, we even have snorkels for goodness sakes (well, some of us do). Seems to me that even a very poor swimmer could survive until they die of starvation or exposure to the cold water with any single one of these items, let alone all of them.

 

[plot]

So, at any point in an emergency situation does your wetsuit, fins, or BCD fling themselves off your body? If not, the difference between being able to swim 100 meters or 10,000 meters with no equipment seems to be irrelavent. Sheesh, we even have snorkels for goodness sakes (well, some of us do). Seems to me that even a very poor swimmer could survive until they die of starvation or exposure to the cold water with any single one of these items, let alone all of them.

Pretty much. If you guys are swimming so much, I think you're doing something wrong. All I ever do is kick my feet... and being in good shape will let me do that forever.

 

[lamont]

I don't think "confident in the water" and "good swimmer" are necessarily related. A person can easily be a great swimmer, but afraid to leave the swimming pool were they can see the bottom. Once they get into those deeper areas, they might get very uncomfortable and nervous... and visa versa. Someone that can barely swim might be perfectly comfortable sitting in the water (I know I am).

I started out a really horrible swimmer and perfectly comfortable on the water provided that I could float and/or breathe off a reg -- building comfort with diving was all about ensuring that I knew what to do under any circumstance to establish positive buoyancy and getting comfortable with gas management. Learning how to swim has helped me with my gas consumption and general fitness, but it hasn't really made me any more comfortable in the water... Swimming is not the answer to the diving problems of not being able to get positive and not running OOA...

 

[lamont]

I don't mean to single you out here but I selected your post (as representative) from the many others here who admtt to being poor swimmers. (even one scuba instructor who "hates" swimming!?!) First of all.......Why would you chose scuba diving as a sport if you don't like or even feel comfortable in the water???

So, in preface I did fix this problem with me because my agency of choice (GUE) like their swim tests and I was tired of dreading the swim tests...

When I was a crappy swimmer I was perfectly comfortable in the water. Throw me in a boat or a kayak with a life vest on, or a in an inner tube and I love it. I grew up around kayaks and canoes due to my parent's cabin on a lake in central B.C.

Throw me nearly naked into the water with no floatation at all... not so comfortable... I'm still not super comfortable since I'm so negative and I'm not sure how I'd do swimming in deep open water as opposed to a pool -- I'm a little worried that if I cramped it might not be so good...

And if you notice a lot of the people who are comfortable in the water but are not strong swimmers are cold water divers. Up here all you have to do is ditch your gear, drop any weights and you'll be amazingly positive just throuh the natural buoyancy of your wet/drysuit. During the summertime, in particular, I like to float around the shallows in only my drysuit all the time to keep cool before/during dives or when doing shore/deco support... This is very different from warm water diving where you might me diving in shorts and t-shirt and ditching gear means swimming for it...

Swimming is *not* the end all be all of being comfortable in the water... And I'll take the person who is not a strong swimmer but a very strong scuba diver any day over the strong swimmer who runs out of gas at depth....

 

[lowwall]

I'm with Devil505 on this. Good swimming skills are a vital prerequisite to all but the most basic diving. If you don't swim well, it would be foolhardy not to place strict limitations on the conditions under which you will dive.

If you are the Best swimmer ever, will it do you any good if you catch a cramp in your legs or lower back?

Yes. It's been 20 years since my last collegiate water polo game, which I mostly spent sitting on the bench, but I still have no trouble treading water with just my hands. I even can manage with one hand for a couple of minutes.

Even during high school, we were expected to go the full two hour workout without touching the sides of the pool and the bottom was 12' deep since it doubled as the diving tank.

 

[Devil505]

So it appears that what we are arguing about here is whether or not it is important to know how to swim in a sport that usualy involves being out in the middle of the unforgiving, unpredictable, open ocean!?!
I think even the Bush administration (......we are winning the war on terror..even though we are creating more terrorists than existed b4 the Iraq invasion..........Are you gonna believe me or your lying eyes??) would have trouble arguing the other side of this!
I don't believe that anyone should be advising weak ( or based on some posts, virtual non-) swimmers to jump right in & become another statistic in the Darwin Awards!

 

[Dreadnaught]

ROFL!! I can see the headline now:

Non-Swimming Diver Drowns(ap)
(name withheld)'s lifeless body was pulled out of the Atlantic Ocean today after he, a non-swimmer who had recently taken up scuba diving as a hobby, had tried to visit the wreck of the Titanic. In a sad irony, his blind brother was killed in a car accident while attempting to drive to the morgue to identify the remains.

 

[lamont]

Can any of the swimming nazis here actually come up with a situation that a cold water diver would face where swimming ability (not just fitness and endurance) would help avoid a fatality? I can't figure one out...