Just wondering, how often do you need/use your snorkle when you dive?
When we did our OW, the snorkle was optional. The last boat dive we did, not one diver had a snorkle. This included a DM and instructor. I don't wear one yet because I have not had to and just think it will be in my way. Just trying to get a different point of view.
This "optionality" attitude seems to have been kicking around for several years now. I'll admit that I was thinking about leaving mine in the gearbag, but a near-tragic dive in Bequia several years ago convinced me otherwise.
A snorkel is an essential piece of survival gear. You need one for almost all open water dives. The only time I take mine off is when I'm doing overhead environment dives.
A snorkel is a piece of gear that when you need it you need it bad...Keep your snorkel ( get a streamline one), learn how to use it, and it may save you someday.
Well said. While one may be able to go 500 dives without ever really needing a snorkel, when the situation calls for it, the remaining alternative may very well be to start literally ditching the rest of your gear. I can still recall my first dive instructor saying:
"A weightbelt is cheaper than a casket...don't be afraid of dropping it".
Really? I have gone 10 years without one and have not come close to needing one even once. How long do you think it will take before it becomes apparent that it is essential, 20 years, or 30 maybe? I'll take my chances. What other gear do you take that you only need once every 20 years?
And for how many decades have we carried an Octopus, but never had an OOA either?
In thinking about this, what a snorkel does for a diver is that it allows him to exert less energy to get a breath of air on the surface (usually post-dive is when this is more important, safety-wise).
The energy required to keep your mouth above water isn't a big of a deal...when the water's flat calm, and its only for a few minutes.
The energy required to keep your mouth above water is also not a big deal if your BCD design is something like an old horsecollar even a Jacket style BCD with front inflation, as these both encourage a "face up" orientation. However, the contemporary change to a back-inflated sytem (Wing) and you're tipping forward. Add a heavy underwater camera, and the face-down problem is exasperated, particularly if you're out on travel holiday diving and the tank is an AL80 (being empty, it is now even more buoyancy on your back).
Again, it isn't that unmanageble problem to keep your face out of the water for a 5 minute float in choppy seas as a RIB motors over to you for pickup on a drift...
...the problem starts to crop up when you've been floating for 10 minutes and blasting your horn and waving your SMB ... and there's still no pickup boat. Ten minutes floating becomes fifteen, and 15 becomes 20 ... and you're cold and getting even more tired from keeping your face out of the water due to surface trim and rough seas.
This starts to describe the diving in the Galapagos out at Wolf and Darwin, where the liveaboard's SOP is that you're not supposed to turn on your EPRIB to signal disgress until you've been floating on the surface for at least 30+ minutes.
Some divers come up with a litany of rationales about why they do not have a snorkel. In most cases, when you examine those rationales, most of them boil down to the divers not being comfortable using a snorkel.
Agreed. Years ago, the sport only attracted customers who already had high (to very high) levels of watermanship skills ... but the direction that the marketing has gone for the past 30 years is an "Anyone Can" attitude.
It is not survival gear. It is not life support equipment. It is not safety equipment. It is not required.
There may be one or two places where a snorkel is helpful. I haven't found those places yet. When I do, I'll take a snorkel diving. Until then the snorkel stays home.
How does a snorkel save your life? When you use a snorkel, you must be on the surface already.
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Quite simply, a snorkel is a piece of safety gear to reduce your odds of drowning while you're on the surface.
Sure, the frequency with which such a confluence of events occurs where it becomes a "life-saving" issue may very well be rare...but we're still all carrying Octopus regulators today just in case of an OOA, and they're both bigger (more prone to tangling) and more expensive, but not complaining about them, so what gives? It seems that some of us are willing to let comfort be more important than safety.
In the case of the Bequia dive that I alluded to, the snorkle-less diver would have drowned had it not been for them receiving assistance from both their buddy as well as myself. To describe the incident briefly, the basic problem was for us to survive a 30 minute surface float because the chase boat misjudged the drift current, which was then coupled with surface conditions weren't particularly benign. We were diving along the windward side of some rocky cliffs (no exit points) and as we drifted south, the prevailing wind & surface chop pushed us closer and closer in to the rocks, causing the chop to change to combers breaking over our heads, so we had to repeatedly expend energy to keep swimming out away from the cliffs. Because the sea conditions were too rough to swim on one's back (face up, the standard excuse for a diver without a snorkel) to try to do this meant putting your back to the incoming seas, which meant that you would get ambushed by every wave (inhaling water), so the snorkle-less diver was using their regulator as a snorkel replacement and first sucked their tank dry.
They then fatigued out and were rescued by us taking turns pulling them along by their tank valve in a rescue tow, with our snorkels in place to face into the waves, and we all were watching for the incomging waves and helping to call when they were going to hit us. It was slow, heavy, and repetitive work, but except to abandon the distressed & fatigued out diver to let them get smashed against the cliffs, there was no alternative.
After the chase boat arrived, they quickly pulled us a bit further offshore where we then rested for a minute in the boat's lee, then proceeded to strip the gear off of the distressed diver and hand it up. Our own gear followed, and then we helped push the distressed diver aboard to the crew, then drag ourselves onboard to complete the dive exit.
But you can do it without the use of snorkel, right? Just less convenient.
So, once again, the snorkel is far from being a "safety device" or a "life support device". It's at most a convenience...or in some cases an inconvenience.
When a snorkel allows for less energy to be exerted, this extends the amount of time that a diver can float on the surface before they fatigue out. So what do you want to call a piece of gear that extends the amount of time you can survive in an environment? Once the diver's physical limits are exceeded, he's clearly at risk of death from drowning.
IMO, another thing to remember is that regardless of how many dives of experience we have, it is also a question of the variety of dives which are possible and what our personal venues have been. For example, a diver who only ventures into freshwater quarries, where the water's always flat and he can just flip onto his back to paddle the 200yds to shore - - simply won't ever run into the types of situations where the elements are more survivable with a snorkel. As such, we need to consider not only what our experiences have been, but also all of the other reasonably likely dive conditions and situations before we try to make a generalization.
What it really comes down to is the conditions that one dives in. I've done literally hundreds of dives where I've had the luxury of being able to resurface right under an anchored boat in good conditions - - for this sort of dive, a snorkel turns out to not be particularly necessary. However, I've also had dives where I've ascended and the boat was nowhere to be seen. A few of these have subsequently had surface floats that were long enough such that fatigue became a safety concern.
I'm keeping my snorkel, because if I die diving, I don't want my obituary to have any chance of reading as: "Drowned because the dummy left behind a $20 piece of standard dive gear."
-hh
