Should I wear a snorkel or not

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I agree but that is through the operator saying you broke the rules so we won't do business with you anymore.

It just seems very hard for a government to enforce something like this as a citation or criminal matter.

Right they use the proprietors to enforce the regs, just like they use them as tax collectors to collect sales tax for them.
 
My training here in South Africa was heavily influenced by BSAC.
Snorkels and knives were prerequisits.
I snorkled for years before scuba, so the snorkel was on my RHS. Have never acclimatised to LHS really. I spearfished and played u/water hockey. Maybe I should have been French as Spiros came over my left shoulder.
The commercials here seem to have an aversion to snorkle/knives.
The one time I ditched the snorkel, I had to do a long surface swim! That taught me!
I usually have a snorkel attatched to my cylinder band using an inner tube as a strap. It is usually just a mouth piece attatched to a wide bore bent plumbing pipe that I recycled from my hockey kit as I tend to bite off the teeth grips.
I had a fold up one for my pocket at one stage.
I always dive with a small knife on the inside of my left calf or BC strap. When I finally lose all my knives (I seem to have collected these during my dives) , I might consider a line cutter.
I consider a cutting instrument essential after brushing with fishingline quite often.
The back attached snorkel is part of my BC so is not extra clutter.
 
I have worn a snorkel since before I started scuba, and wear one except when it would be a hazard on the dive, at which point I carry it unde the straps of my BFK. I mostly shore dive, with long surface swims, and find the snorkel quite handy. The boat dives are mostly hunting trips so the main point of the dive was not to surface near the boat, so more than a fair amount of surface swims were involved.

I'm not the scuba police, so I really don't care how others kit up. I have seen some regret the choice to ditch their snorkel, but not any large numbers. Ymmv.
 
On some dives like @Bob DBF posted having a snorkel to use can be an asset. I was so accustomed to wearing a snorkel I've got a picture of me wearing one an ice dive! Just forgot to take it off, someone asked me if I was going to make a hole in the ice for the snorkel. :)

Cave and ice diving doesn't offer many scenarios where a snorkel is useful so why take one?

Shore diving certainly offers a plethora of scenarios for using a snorkel. Last week I snorkeled over 200 yards in 10' of water with 20' vis quite a pleasant way to get to the dive site, much more interesting than looking at the sky while swimming on my back.
 
I wouldn't have bet against it, just sayin'.
All I would need is time and huh, air. :)

I've read stories about guys taking pneumatic drills connected to a LP port under the ice with the intention of sticking a snorkel thru the ice for surface location if they lost the hole.

I preferred having my line secured to my harness then wrapping a big loop of the line before the harness connection around my wrist and then holding on to it, always seemed a more reliable way to stay in touch with the surface to me.
 
In my old dive unit in Wyoming, we use to shovel all the snow off the ice in a star pattern branching outwards from the hole to about 75-100 feet. If for some reason we came off the line, we could look up and see the line that could guide you back to the hole. Granted, worked in daytime but we never made an ice dive at night.

Funny thing about snorkels, while I don't use them and can't remember the last time I did, I still can't seem to throw any of them away and own several.
 
Now that we have discussed this trivial matter for quite a while, and all relevant things have probably been said, I would like to present one more point of view.

Snorkels were used in 350 BCE (+/- a few decades). Now, if a tool has been used for 2370 years, it cannot be completely useless, can it?

Proof: Aristotle [Aristoteles, 384-322 BCE] writes in Parts of animals, book II, chapter XVI: "Some divers, when they go down into the sea, provide themselves with a breathing-machine, by means of which they can inhale the air from above the surface while they remain for a long time in the water. Nature has provided the elephant with something of this sort by giving him a long nose."

Now you say that they did not use compressed air, and you are wrong, as in Problemata it is told that cauldrons were sent to the bottom to provide divers with breathing air, compressed of course :D And, oh, it did not always end well as the ancient Greeks had not invented the concept of pressure.
 

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