Snorkelling
Things To Know About Snorkelling
What Is Snorkelling?
Snorkelling is swimming through a body of water, with eqiupment to help you swim and see underwater to explore the waters and the animals and life under the surface.
Equipment And Care Of
The equipment used for snorkelling includes:
-diving mask.
-tube (called a snorkel)
-fins.
Underwater Science - The Ear, Equalising, Buoyancy
In order to snorkel and dive successfully, you have to know about the ear, equalising and buoyancy.
The Ear-
Equalising-
When you dive down, the air compresses, causing problems with your ears and sinuses. These are techniques to equalise your ears:
1. Valsalva Maneuver: pinch your nostrils and blow through your nose.
2. Toynbee Technique: pinch your nose and swallow.
3.Lowry Technique: pinch your nose, then blow and swallow at the same time.
4. Edmands Technique: while tesning the palate(tissue at the back of your mouth) and throat muscles and pushing your jaws, up and down, do a Valsalva Maneuver.
5. Frenzel Maneuver: close your nostrails and close your throat as if straining to lift a weight. make the sound of the letter K. this forces the back of your tongue up, compressing air against the opeing of your Eustachian tubes.
6. Voluntary Tubal Opening: tense the muscles of the soft palate and the throat while pushing the jamw forward and down as if starting to yawn.these muscle pull the Eustachian tubes open.
If you do not equalise your ears, you could end up with ruptured blood vessels, and cause inflammation and swelling.
Buoyancy-
Buoyancy is the aility or tendency of something to float in the water or other fluid and it is the upward force that an object fells from the water.
when an object floats, the upward buoyant force exerted from by the water is greater than the downward force of the weight of the object. When an object sinks, the weight of the object is greater than the upward buoyant force exerted by the water.
So divers can go snorkelling, they use weight belts. These are belts that are conected to weights, so you can go down to any depth.
Skills- getting in and out of the water, finning and planning, duck diving, clearing your snorkel, clearing your mask, basic first aid and dangers.
Getting in and out of the water-
Try to avoid walking on your flippers. The angle in them, which allows you to swim efficiently, prevents you from walking on them. If you need to walk on the flippers, walk backward so it is much easier.
To go off a beach, leave your flippers off until you stand chest-deep and sideways towards the waves. Then put them on. Make sure you put your mask on first.
To enter the water from a rock. Put your flippers on and go down the rock into the water as far as you can. Squat down and make yourself as low as possible. Wait for a wave that carries you up, then roll down (slide into the water) and away from the rock. Divers learn to 'take a big stride forward' to get into the water from a platform. This is okay from boats but is not safe from rocks. You could badly hurt yourself and stamp into sharp sea urchins as well.
Finning and planning-
When you go diving, you have to know things like weather, ocean conditions and wether you have a friend or friends to go with.
There are serveral different ways you can dive. These include: flutter kick, frog kick short frog kick, backwards kicks and split kick.
Duck diving-
one of the key skills to snorkelling is learninbg to duck dive. This involves bending the waist and then kicking your legs in the air. This puts you in a vertical position which will take you under. Normally, you would keep the snorkel in your mouth and then blow the water out of the snorkel. Then you can carry on breathing without taking the snorkel out of your mouth.
Clearing your mask-
First, allow a small amount of water to enter into your mask, just below your eye level. Tilt you head up, and blow out through your nose. As you are doing this, this forces the water out through the ottom of the mask. before you stop exhaling, look back down at the ground to prevent water flowing into your nose. If water remains in your mask, repeat.
Basic first aid-
divers should know basic first aid to know how to treat injured snorkellers. the diver providing first aid should hold a current diving first aid training qualification.
Dangers-
Snorkelling can be very dangerous. Deaths from cardiac or suspected cardiac causes-60
Deaths from surface drowning, which occurred largely in inexperienced snorkellers-33 Deaths from drowning after prolonged breath-hold diving, which occurred largely in experienced snorkellers-19
Deaths from trauma (10)
Eight people died of other causes and forensic pathology details were unavailable in 10 cases.
Other dangers of snorkelling include:
-tides
-animals (stonefish, eels, sharks, stingrays etc.)