being the regular expectation. With these conditions one can, I am reliably informed by Monty, see a number of large fish species swimming around you.
However, very recent rain had, not for the first time in my snorkelling career, rendered the underwater conditions akin to a torchless night dive. Much fun was had, especially the use of the world’ s largest SMB as a dive boat, and I have enough faith in Monty to recommend this place when the viz is better. You can certainly cover a lot of water with next to no effort.
Although drift dives can be accomplished at sea for snorkellers, rivers can provide some excellent opportunities for drifting. They fall into two broad categories. The sprint and the endurance runs.
Sprint runs: These tend to require snorkellers to drift the fast sections, then exit to the bank when the flow subsides and walk back to the start point. They are often gorges, canyons or narrower sections of the river. The main attraction, at sites such as Monty’ s Bantham Swoosh or The Linn of Dee, is the speed. Think snorkelling meets‘ rollercoaster’.
Care must be taken with conditions, as these runs can become fast and powerful very quickly. Avoiding recent rains will not only make it safe but, as I found, also
All aboard the Monty Raft give you more chance of spotting the local wildlife and submerged geology. These types of sites are logistically simpler since you start and end in relative proximity.
Endurance Runs: These are longer, oneway journeys and tend to be all-day affairs. I’ ve drifted down long stretches of the Dart and Severn Rivers covering more than a dozen miles in one snorkel. These are lazy days out. Take a drybag-come-SMB to store drinks, snacks, sun cream. You can cover a lot of countryside and landscape, seeing plenty of wildlife above and below the surface. This is a true, laidback drift.
In Germany, many years ago, a local dive club had a Boxing Day tradition of drifting down( in drysuits, mainly) the town’ s river and stopping off at the numerous Bierkellers on the banks. Of course, I could never be seen to endorse some kind of
drift-snorkel-pub-crawl in BSAC’ s official magazine … but the 1990s do hold some unpublishable memories for me.
The main point is that all these sites are made for snorkellers. The constant climb out and walk back to the entry point of a sprint drift would be sapping in full dive kit. Likewise the slow, shallow nature of the longer runs make cumbersome dive kit pointless. Far more important than BCDs, regs and cylinders, you need space for flasks or soup and carefully waterproofed sandwiches. Happy Swooshing. �
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
Andy’ s set-up for safe river snorkelling
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