Needing a snorkel is going to have to stem from how you are diving.....If you are drift diving from a boat ( the best way for a diver to dive), there is little need, as when you surface, the boat is there...since few scuba divers are prepared to swim to shore from 2 or more miles out, if for some reason the boat is not visible on your surfacing, rather than trying to snorkel to shore, most would get comfortable on the surface and wait for signaling and pick up opportunities by the next boat they see....the snorkel would just be wasted junk in this scenario, for most divers. If both you and your buddy are comfortable doing the 2 plus mile swim in, than maybe a snorkel would be viable, if you are frequently making horrible choices as to what boat you are going to dive from( and captain).
If you anchor dive, you may end up with more forced surface swims to get to the boat when you miscalculate your return to the boat after the halfway point on the dive....for these divers, a snorkel may in fact, be a critical gear piece. Since the actual function of the snorkel will be critical if you ever "need it", you would not want a flexible hose snorkel. Talk to most freedivers, and they will tell you how badly the flexible hose snorkels work, compared to the straight J style freedivers use. While the flexi hose may be OK in very calm conditions, when it gets rougher, the flexi hose snorkels flop around all over, and you end up sucking in way too much water. This type of diver should really become highly proficient in snorkling, because it is a critical skill for them--and this means they should be using the best snorkels, as the freedivers do ( with no purges to fail at the wrong time). The trade off is that you will either need to find a comfortable way to have the snorkel clipped to your head, or have a pocket on your thigh or waiste band that you can store the pocket in. See the pocket concept in photo on
DIR Part 2
If you shore dive, the snorkel is even more essential, so the same applies from anchor diving.
I myself dive South Florida, home to drift diving. I have been tech diving, scuba diving, and freediving since the 80's, and my choice would be to drift dive at any site in the world--it's just typically best for the divers, though harder for the boat. For my Florida scuba or tech diving, I do not use a snorkel--even though I am a freediver and snorkel use is as natural to me as walking. It would just be cluttering gear I would never have occaision to use, which means it should not be taking up storage space--you want to be slick in the water, not a swimming junkyard of gear that will not be used. Even in places like Fiji, where the boat goes many miles out to pinnacle structures that are clustered with like 3 to 6 of within 50 yards or so of each other --and anchoring is the solution employed by the boats---I only found usefulness for my snorkel when I passed on using the scuba tank, and opted to freedive with the scuba divers. Here you have a Fijian dive master acting like a hiking guide, taking you from one pinacle, then cutting across the bottom to the next, and the next, and ultimately ending up back at the boat. It left little use for a snorkel, unless you were freediving. **And I still think drift diving would be the better way to dive Fiji, as long as each of the dive groups have similar abilities, and they stick together in buddy teams. But with all the novice divers that show up at destinations like this, mixed with advanced divers, the local have found it simpler to restrict the overall area of a dive, and the time, to allow for the novice divers.
