In this episode of The Dive Locker podcast we discuss the issues surrounding wearing a snorkel while scuba diving.

Welcome to the dive locker podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest in diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management, and dive business. I am your host TEC Clark.

To wear or not to wear. That is the question. Welcome to the great snorkel debate. Well, as you know, this debate has been Epic and legendary and it takes place all over on our dive boats, in bars, online. Just look at scubaboard and look at the amount of people that talk about whether to wear snorkels or not. Um, it is pretty, pretty crazy. In fact, it’s just as passionate as what political party you belong to. People are really kind of fanatical about this, but in this episode, I don’t want to do a clichéd pros and cons side of this and why, you know, we’d like to wear them and why we don’t like to wear them. Okay. We get that right. What I want to do is I want to get into more of an insidious side of this debate where this actually unravels with dive professionals.

But before we launch into it, I am so excited to share with you that I’m days away from launching my new online tutorial called mastering dive tables and decompression theory. I designed this course for numerous divers, but especially aspiring dive pros who are challenged by dive tables and or decompression theory. Now this is especially beneficial for those becoming divemasters or instructors because not only do they have to pass their exams on dive table usage, you also need to be able to teach it and use it, and whether it’s dive tables or decompression theory. So this mastering dive tables and decompression theory online course will help anyone at any level master the areas of decompression theory and how to use dive tables. There’s practice questions, there’s a study guide, um, it’s in both metric and Imperial measurements. That’s really cool. And there’s an entire module on how to use the PADI eRDPml that’s the electronic recreational dive planner multilevel.It’s pretty cool for multilevel dive calculations.

And another great feature is that you as a dive pro can be an affiliate for this course. So when you have a student that just isn’t getting dive tables or deco theory, you can send them your affiliate link and when they sign up for the course, you receive a commission. That’s pretty cool. So look for this to go live in the next few days. I will have it all over Social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the scubaguru.com website, all over. So please look for it. It’s coming out real soon. All right, so here we go with today’s episode, the great snorkel debate.

All right, we get it. People don’t like to wear snorkels, right? We hear it all the time and the explanations are numerous. They get caught, they pull when there’s a strong current, they are clumsy and bulky. They get in the way, they’re uncomfortable, they pull your hair, the list goes on and on, right? But people don’t like to wear them for many of those reasons. And what we’re not talking about here is the technical side, right? That debate doesn’t even enter into the technical arena. When we’re going into overhead environments, cave and wreck penetration, cavern, obviously we do not want that piece of equipment when we’re doing that type of activity. So it goes without saying. That’s not even in the standards. So just goes without saying. We’re not talking about that. So just remove the whole snorkel issue from technical diving. I’m talking more about the recreational diving and especially in recreational instruction, recreational leadership, uh, the requirement of it for a student, the requirement of a pro, right?

Where does this all start? Why do the agencies require a snorkel to be a piece of leadership equipment and student equipment? What’s out there in the marketplace? Why are there skill standards for wearing a snorkel? You see, these are the questions that must be teased out to really get into this debate. This is the heart and soul of it. Not whether the thing is clumsy or bulky or whatever. It’s all of these other things. So let’s take a look here first. We need to start. Why? Why in the first place do we have a snorkel? Okay, great. We got the whole snorkeling thing. There’s a whole activity called snorkeling and skin diving. Yeah, we float the surface and look at fish. Great. Tons of people are doing it, but what we’re talking about here is on scuba. Okay? So that’s where we get into this.

It’s all about the airway control at the surface. Now we all know what airway control involves. It means having a controlled airway in the aquatic environment such that a mask is on to protect the nasal passages and a regulator or snorkel is in the mouth to protect the respiratory tracks and the mouth especially. So what we’ve got here is that airway control exists in the use of a snorkel in lieu of a regulator. So once we get that regulator out of our mouth, we have something else in to protect now. So when we take a look at this, um, many of you are probably going well, that’s kind of ridiculous. Okay, well I get where you’re coming from. Now look, I grew up here in South Florida. I’ve been in the water all my life. And in fact, the triathlon training down here, we swim in the ocean and all we’re wearing as a Goggle to do ocean training.

Okay, so when you talk about airway control and you talk about seas and you talk about waves and surf zones and everything like that, look, I’m pretty, pretty comfortable with that, so I could be on that soapbox that says I don’t need it. I absolutely don’t need it. I got my own airway control and I’m really good at it and blah, blah, blah. Well great. That’s because I grew up at an around an ocean all my life. But what about that person from Indiana that learned how to swim in a YMCA as an adult and is now all excited about scuba diving because they’re going on a honeymoon and they go and they’re in a quarry and that’s it. And my gosh, what’s that person going to do when we get out to the open water? You see if I take a face full of salt water and I swallow that down, you know what?

That’s just part of life. That’s just part of living down here. I’ll get over it. It’s fine. It becomes part of my diet, right? But to somebody else, that can be one of the most unsettling things that leads to coughing, choking leads to gagging leads to a vomit, nausea. I mean, there’s so much, right? So that’s just one thing. So, and I think you all heard my story too, that I actually worked a case as a forensic dive accident investigator where an individual did not have airway control at the surface after a dive. They were perfectly healthy, perfectly fine, perfectly great dive, but they didn’t have their mask on nor their reg in their mouth. They held onto the tagline, the current was strong, the waves kept hitting him in the face and on and on and on. And the person died right there, right there at the surface.

So to say that airway control is an issue, it certainly is. It’s indisputable. So let’s look at the why of this. So we all know that some of the practical applications of this is that if you’re doing a long swim, a surface swim from the boat to a dive site or from the beach to a dive site, you don’t want to waste tank air and you want to be able to have that snorkel instead of the regulator in breathing your, your tank air when you’re at the surface, right? But then there’s also the point that is, well what if you come out of the dive and you’re out of air and you’ve reached the surface. You cannot wear your regulator in your mouth when you’ve got no air. So you’ve got to substitute it for something else. There’s another practical time to have that snorkel in.

So when we think about it in all of these aspects, there are practical applications for it and there are people that it works for, but we don’t get that luxury to just pick and choose who wears snorkels and who doesn’t. It’s actually a required piece of equipment. So when we’re talking about students going through an open water diver course, let’s say it is a required piece of gear. When we’re talking about the leadership equipment of dive masters, pros, instructors, et cetera, snorkels are required. Now we often get this piece that says when a student takes a course, they’re now going to buy the required equipment that they need. And a lot of times it’s just the soft goods, it’s the mask, fins, snorkel, maybe wetsuits, maybe lead, maybe some accessories here and there, right? Every shop is different on that. But here’s what we’re seeing.

What we see is that the classic student comes in to buy that stuff and then they have the assortment of different choices to choose from. And what we’re seeing is that the industry is pumping out snorkels that have features to them. And these features sound really, really great in theory, such as a purge valve. Now a lot of us like purge valves, they work and they’re simple and gravity does its job and there’s barely any air that needs to be pushed through. There’s some cool features to that. I get it. Okay. But then once we start looking at some of the other designs such as a top of a snorkel that is designed such that when a wave goes over it and either seals up or by its design, water cascades over the side and does not go down the airway. Interesting. Well now to have that kind of design, what has to be added to it more plastic.

And also when we’re talking about that purge, well, what kind of purge is it and what is that spec? Well, how is it engineered into the snorkel? Well, a lot of times that can be a big bulky and as well housing that purge in there. So what sounds good on theory, you know, Oh this is a super dry snorkel or whatever. Well now it also comes with a big bore and more plastic to support all of those functions. And what are we looking at now? Now we’re looking at a heavy snorkel, a big, a bulky snorkel, and now let’s think of this. When we’re actually wearing a snorkel for scuba diving, what’s the amount of time we’re actually on that snorkel at the surface? Right? How much of that time? Hardly any by comparison to the dive, the majority of the time the snorkel is submerged underwater.

That means it’s full of water. Do we really need all of these features? Because here’s what I’m seeing. These students are making a decision early on. They’re going with what they think is best and sounds really good. Sometimes the shop is even pushing the ones with more features because there’s a little bit more margin in them.  And what happens now the student is in the class and they are struggling with this snorkel and maybe during the class they saw an instructor who isn’t wearing a snorkel, but they’ve got it folded up a fold up one and they all of a sudden question, well why aren’t you wearing a snorkel? And the instructor says, Oh, I hate it. Or a dive master in the class, oh yeah I hate snorkels so I just, I just have this other one. Well wait a minute so I can dive without it?

And I got this one, but there’s another kind that I could buy that I just carry with me and all? Do you see how that leads to confusion? And so what takes place there in that moment is you’ve just placed a seed of doubt in the student’s mind. Who do I trust now is their question, the person that sold this to me in the dive center or my instructor or the person leading me on a dive or whatever. Do you see how that actually becomes an issue? And that starts to diminish the professionalism of either one of those camps. So that is something that is seen and it seen quite often. And then the person has to make the decision of, well my instructor doesn’t wear one so I don’t want to wear one. Interesting. So then they’re forced to do it for the class.

And then what happens after the class? Who knows? Sometimes they take them off right away. Sometimes they get the folding kind, whatever. But it wasn’t what they were trained on was it? So that then leads to the standards training. So when we’re looking at this, why is teaching snorkel clearing a part of this? Well obviously we’ve got skin diving standards built into many of the scuba agencies, open water diver and there is the requirement to clear a snorkel. Okay, great. But then what about the scuba side of it? Well there’s the snorkel regulator exchange. Now if you think about this skill, what are we doing? We’re coming to the surface and we are doing an exchange of the regulator for the snorkel and we’re going to go back and forth when we do this with our students, right? A couple of breaths each here, a couple of breaths, beach and we just go back and forth, back and forth until we found mastery is taking place with that and so the skills to be that the person doesn’t bop their head out of the water and change these things over.

It’s to be done in the water. Now we have to ask why this is a training standard. That’s the big thing folks, is that why are we requiring the people to wear this and why are we trying this as a skill standard? It’s because of the countless cases and times when airway control has been a problem. When somebody wasn’t able to have a snorkel at the surface, when somebody was in a challenged situation where they may have run out of air coming to the surface and now they immediately have to go over. We’ve seen it in rough seas and rough situations. Now look, here’s, here’s why this is you’re talking that people in agencies and, and when I say agencies, I don’t mean a collective of people in one agency that have developed the standard. We can go point to the standard in the R S T C the recreational scuba training council.

So that minimum agency standard is there to which all other agencies are to follow that minimum. And sure enough, the snorkel regulator exchange is in the RSTC standard, it means it needs to be taught. And because of that though, the people that are doing that is a table load of dive industry professionals, hundreds of years of experience in that room all coming up with, yes, this is why we need to teach this skill. So I can not wear a snorkel. And I can come into rough seas and you know, do something with the boat and give signals to them and be just fine until the boat gets to me. But what happens to that person from Indiana? What happens from that person – I’m picking on Indiana? I shouldn’t do that. Sorry, everybody from Indiana. I don’t mean to do that, but you know what I’m saying? Somewhere that people are not experienced in the water.

Let’s say they blow off that wreck dive, they miss their ascent line back to the surface and now they are drifting in the ocean. They’re already terrified. So now there they are turning towards the boat to get the boats attention. Well, what’s if the boat is one direction and they’re drifting the other direction? That means that the current and waves are hitting them in the face as they’re facing the boat. So you see why not having the snorkel in that kind of a situation or a regulator in their mouth and that kind of situation becomes an issue as they’re giving signals to the boat? So these are the reasons why this is a standard. And these are the reasons why we put this into place in the standard. Now when we’re talking back on that equipment on the market, right, and all these big bulky bells and whistles and people don’t like ’em and the majority of the time the snorkel is underwater.

Well, what happens when we “need” it? Well, this is what is the issue with the folding snorkel myth, and I’m going to call it a myth. My friends, I’m going to get tons of flack for this. I’m so sorry in advance, but I’m not sorry at the same time. There are dive professionals that say, I get to get around the agency standard by “wearing on me” a folding snorkel. And so because I have it possessed, I am meeting the standard. Okay, I get what you’re saying, but let’s think about this. Does that apply to how you’re going to teach that in the class? No. And so there’s other instructors that say, well, I wear a snorkel for my classes, but when I do other things, I wear my folding snorkel. All right. So now are you sending a message to the people that are watching you as an instructor when you’re not wearing a snorkel and they can’t see that you’ve got a folding one?

That’s interesting, right? So it makes someone from the Midwest go, Hey, I want to be like that guy or gal. Um, they’re not wearing a snorkel. Maybe. Maybe I need to work. Maybe there’s something they know that I don’t know. Or maybe they’ve just mastered you. See, so this becomes an issue once again, where people are kind of looking at you as a model. If you’ve got the folding snorkel. The majority of people that I’ve talked about this with say when I need it, when it’s needed, I’ve got it. All right, so let’s do a big whole hard timeout right now. When do you need it? So for me, I can’t come up with a time that I’m truly going to “need” it. Okay, let’s, let’s think about that for, you know, what we talked about, about my level of comfort and everything like that.

I just can’t come up with a scenario that I’m going to NEED it. But there are people that say that it’s there when needed. Okay. So let’s think about this. When needed is going to be at a time when, and many people say this when the, I’ll put it in my own words. When the fecal matter hits the oscillating device, right? So if you think about that, what are we going to now do? You’re going to take out this, this snorkel, which is not easy access by the way. It’s got to come out. It’s got to come out of its clamshell case or whatnot be unfolded and now it’s gotta be attached to the mask. Now do we need to take the mask off to put the folding snorkel on?  In some cases, yes. And some brands and models, yes. Now what does that do to your, to your airway control?

Uh, not a really good thing. The second thing is those that have admitted to fumbling so badly with trying to put it on, on the outside without taking off their mask, admit to tucking it under the mask strap. Now the, the folding snorkel is already softer than a regular snorkel. Now you’re pinching down on the bore of the snorkel. So when you need it, quote unquote, and you’re at the surface and you’re chugging, now you have a restricted airway. So you think you’re doing something good. But now because you tucked it under that it the mask strap, now all of a sudden you can’t breathe well. And the other thing is there are numerous reports where people have done some serious hard swims into current and because of the pressure of the current and the inhalation force that they’re doing in the snorkel, the snorkels are actually collapsing on themselves.

Again, making not for a great airway. It restricts it. Then you get hypoventilation, not enough gas exchange. Now you’ve got CO2 buildup and now you’re going to be on the throws of panic. You or your student. You see what I’m saying? I’m not picking on people, but here’s the deal. We’ve got to take attention to this. Is it really the solution? And my, I maintain that it’s not because when I’ve seen this, it hasn’t gone well. The many, many, many people that teach this are teaching it with the snorkels on the instructor snorkels on the student and then they do the skill. But when they switch over to a folding snorkel, they don’t practice the snorkel regulator exchange efficiently and effectively to mastery with a folding snorkel, it gets completely overlooked. So what’s going to happen? The person won’t use it when they need it in a true time of airway control.

So is there an answer to this? Well, Hey look, frankly I use a J type snorkel, a freediving snorkel. It’s not bulky. It’s not as cumbersome as other snorkels. Right. And I know how to use the thing. I can clear it in both displacement and blast. Remember we used to teach displacement? You can’t teach displacement with purge snorkels anymore. So you know, people are kind of getting away from those skillsets. I like the simple J style snorkel and it works fine for me. Now, does my snorkel shift in a strong current? Yes. Does it get caught on lines? Occasionally, yes. Does my hair get caught in the snorkel keeper? Occasionally, yes, but those are not strong enough reasons why I would abandon it and talk bad about it to my students. Instead, teach them how to get a snorkel that they can be used to and work with and it would be just an occasional small annoyance, right?

Teach and think about what we’re selling to our students. Look at this from a different perspective. Look at this from an industry perspective. Look at this from a student perspective and look at this from a pro perspective. That’s all I wanted to share today. Think differently about this debate that rages on about whether to wear snorkels or not. I would love to hear from you about this. Let me hear from you by simply go into scuba guru.com find this show notes page for this episode. Click on the microphone and leave me a message. I want to hear from you. Maybe there’s something I haven’t covered here. Maybe there’s something I’m way off on. I’d love to hear your opinion, but again, this isn’t about one way is the best or anything like that. I just want you to exercise your thought process as a dive professional on what we’re showing, what we’re modeling, and what we’re saying to our students, to our divers, to the people that we are mentoring about snorkels.

So that’s it for today, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google play, or Stitcher. That way you’ll be notified of new episodes as soon as they go live and please leave a rating. Items talked about in this episode can be found on the show notes page at scubaguru.com and there you can also click the microphone and leave us a comment. Thanks again. We’ll see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care, my friends.

Thanks For Listening!

Well that’s it for today everyone. Thanks so much for listening. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher. That way you’ll be notified of new episodes as soon as they go live, and please leave a rating. Items talked about in this episode can be found on the show notes page at scubaguru.com. There you can also click on the microphone and leave us a comment. Thanks again. We’ll see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care my friends.

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