Snorkelling over an ancient Greek village during an archaeological project
Infinite run-time – I often refer to my snorkel as a ‘ shallow water rebreather ’. To be accurate , I ’ d have to include the world ’ s photosynthetic systems , since it ’ s these that are helping to recycle my exhaled breath . A little pedantic , perhaps . What this means at a more practical level is that I can snorkel for hours and hours , day after day and never need to refill gas or sofnalime . This makes the snorkel an ideal tool for work where you are spending very long periods in shallow water . I ’ ve used it on archaeological projects in Scotland and Greece , where we spent six hours a day doing surveys on seabeds . It also makes it useful on remote expeditions where there is an inability to support scuba or CCR long term .
Preparation and breakdown – The pre- and post- dive preparation and maintenance is effectively zero cost , in both time and money . You should probably rinse it … but I rarely do . So , not only is it cheaper to purchase , but also to maintain ... and it ’ s very unlikely to break down on you . Something else which makes it a great tool on expeditions .
Expanding the team – Snorkelling is a gateway activity . It can be hard to encourage friends into the water with scuba or CCR , which both require specific , relatively costly and time consuming learning . But you can throw someone a snorkel , take their hand and lead them into our world with no prior experience . This is especially true of children ; if you have people in your life you want to share the underwater world with , take them snorkelling .
All this being said , snorkelling has its restrictions ; depth and continued time underwater are the obvious shortcomings . However , in other scenarios it can allows us to go further for longer and into locations impossible with diving equipment . Its cost , skills requirement and ease of use make the underwater world accessible to all , at least in theory . Sometimes a snorkel is the best tool for the job . �
Even first-timers can ' take the tube ' as a gateway to the underwater world
For more information on snorkelling with BSAC go to bsac . com / snorkelling Looking to introduce snokelling into your club ? Find out more at bsac . com / snorkellinginstructor
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