Snorkel Use

[a878bob]

Imagine that. ! The exact answer I predicted to a simple question to an expert.

No answer!

 

[hypertech]

Yours is invalid with respect to a typical snorkel.

If I'm ever doing a dive where there is a good possibility of being left in the ocean with dry tanks in such conditions it is simply too tiring to survive without a snorkel I'll reconsider. If it takes such an outlier to establish the position that a snorkel is safety gear it is clearly an exception and the general rule is that it is not.

A harness is safety gear for ice diving and flat out silly for most diving. Similarly even if one could argue there are limited applications of a snorkel for safety gear for the most part it is contrived and silly.

Although, I guess if I was marooned on a desert island I could carve it into a fish hook to catch dinner. So maybe there is something to this snorkel as safety gear thing after all.

 

[fnfalman]

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).

A. Not everybody uses a back inflate BC, and even if they were using a back inflate BC if they were to weight themselves right, there's no reason for the BC to "flip them on their face" as you purported.

B. If I were to dive in blue water and chances of becoming adrift are high, or in rough sea, then yes I will wear a snorkel.

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.

Also depends on where I'm at. If I were in cool, temperate water I'd ditch the whole shebang and let my exposure suit float me.

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.

Gears don't replace good diving practice. If you dive in giant kelps, then you better learn how to swim through the kelps UNDERWATER, and plan for your gas consumption so that you don't run out and have to surface in the middle of the forest.

Once again, if exertion is an issue, then ditch the gear.

 

[Thalassamania]

Imagine that. ! The exact answer I predicted to a simple question to an expert.

No answer!

Yours is invalid with respect to a typical snorkel.

If I'm ever doing a dive where there is a good possibility of being left in the ocean with dry tanks in such conditions it is simply too tiring to survive without a snorkel I'll reconsider. If it takes such an outlier to establish the position that a snorkel is safety gear it is clearly an exception and the general rule is that it is not.

A harness is safety gear for ice diving and flat out silly for most diving. Similarly even if one could argue there are limited applications of a snorkel for safety gear for the most part it is contrived and silly.

Although, I guess if I was marooned on a desert island I could carve it into a fish hook to catch dinner. So maybe there is something to this snorkel as safety gear thing after all.

Imagine that. ! The exact answer I predicted to a simple question to an expert.

No answer!

No Bob, you got several answers. One simple one is that a snorkel can serve well as a pocket mask, an essential piece of safety equipment.

If you simply do not seem to like the answers, perhaps that's because they do not jibe with your preconceived notions or perhaps because they imply that you'll have to do some work and learn somethings if you to fully participate in the discussion.

Some history might be useful to help you understand, however.

Back in day several things came together:

1. Diving instruction was based on teaching free diving and then transitioning a competent free diver to scuba, which was very easy since all the "hard" stuff had already been mastered.
2. All that were available were LP Steels and these were often under-filled to 1800 PSI because of compressor limitations.
3. Most diving (at least in California) was shore diving that oft required long surface swims around or through kelp beds.

These things made a snorkel a very important piece of gear, at least to most all divers in California. Several things changed:

1. Higher pressure fills became readily available.
2. Higher volume rigs became more common.
3. Boat diving increased in importance.
4. DEMA began a concerted campaign to convenience the agencies to reduce the content and length of courses. DEMA had the agencies test out a then radical 18 hour course (the testers were me, Dennis Graver and Jon Hardy) that had students on scuba the first night and that eliminated most free diving and rescue skills.

So, if I'm carrying a lot of gas and my dives are limited by decompression considerations rather than gas supply I have little need to conserve my air when I maneuver on the surface in and around the kelp. If I'm diving from a boat rather than shore I may not need to travel on the surface at all. If all I have is 18 hours in which to train a scuba diver, you ditch the "non-essentials" like swimming, rescue and free-diving, and you pick up a bit of time by teaching free-diving skills like mask clearing with an air supply (forgetting the fact that such divers are, at least initially, compromised by their inability to clear a mask if they do not have a working regulator in their mouth). In fact, you create divers who are so dependent on their regulators that they can't swim on the surface without one and that they can't be trusted to enter the water unless their regulator is in their mouth, a practice that, in the old days, was verboten.

So snorkel became emblematic of the difference between the advocates of the 18 hour type course and the longer format courses. Why PADI didn't do away with their requirement years ago is beyond me, but I suspect it was driven by a "steel-toed boot" type of liability consideration and LDS profits.

But amongst those of us who did not make that compromise, snorkels remained an normal part of our gear and, as is to be expected, found their way into other uses, such as in place of pocket masks and rescue breathing.

So I am not saying that there is, or should be, some cosmic rule that anyone has to either know how to use, or in fact use, a snorkel. A snorkel, in the hands of a trained and practiced diver, is many things, including a piece of safety equipment, but in the hands of some other divers it may well only be an overpriced piece of plastic, similar things might be said about any piece of diving equipment.

 

[Petert71]

I dive with a back-inflate (Black Diamond) and being pushed face down on the surface isn't a problem unless I actually over-inflate the BC. It's well weighted and I can comfortably float with my head out of the water without full inflation and no forward preasure.

Hence I don't require a snorkel to float comforabley on the surface.

If I'm tired, I've found I can inflate the BC even more, roll on my back and use it like a raft with most of my torso out of the water. I love this BC!

I have had one dive where I wish I did have a snorkel and didn't. It was a shore dive in choppy conditions. The snorkel would have been very useful to make swimming easier at the end of the dive.

I usually don't dive with a snorkel, but if it's rough I do take it.

 

[Splitlip]

Thal:
Don't know if you did it yet in this thread, but post the pic of your Farallon snorkel if you don't mind.

For the diving I do, I leave the snorkel behind because I dive swift currents and have been hanging on a line and had the snorkel break the mask seal. Also don't like the mouthpiece hanging by my inflator. Thal is correct in that the old 60's-70's simple low profile tubes would do much better. As I recall, my old "shotgun" never gave me issues in the early 70's.

Wish I could find it. I think it would do better than even the new free diving snorkels.

Interesting about DEMA dumbing down the training to sell more gear/faster.

 

[Thalassamania]

 

[Splitlip]

Yep. That's it. No drag, no dangly. One might say a diver could mistake his snorkel mouth piece for his reg. (I admit, I posted that.) That, however is the diver, not the equipment.

As you did Thal, I had to pass a swim test, did several free diving sessions before we were introduced to SCUBA. I was surprised (and both pleased and disappointed) that my daughter did SCUBA the first day of class.

 

[Thalassamania]

It is hard to confuse the snorkel with anything else, your regulator is on the other side and when you drop the snorkel from your mouth it hangs behind your head, just slightly to the left of the center line. Wearing it that way (this picture is of my son; back a few years ... he now has two inches on me!) I have never had any issue with tangling my long hose as I go to deploy it. I can see, however, how that might be an issue with a "dry snorkel" that has purge valves and do-dads on the top and that is mounted where the strap meets the mask frame, as is commonly seen.

 

[Mr Carcharodon]

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.


-hh[/QUOTE]

So you lost the boat, you ran out of the gas in three tanks, or at least did not think to share gas with an out of gas diver, and had a team that was unfit for the conditions. And the solution to all of this is a snorkel? Might there be other potential solutions?