A Guide To Snorkel Gear

Hi, I am Howard Payne. I'm an instructor with Dive Wimbledon. We are at five-star IDC center here in Southwest London, and I teach both recreational and technical diving and I have been diving for about eight years.

And today, I am going to give you a little bit of advice on equipment and how to scuba dive. A great way of trying out diving or seeing whether you like being underwater is snorkelling. Jack is a huge snorkelling fan.

He has got some of the equipments that you use for snorkelling here. Firstly for snorkelling, we do not tend to use the open heel fin that we use for diving. You can see here, if I just take that little plastic cover out of that, we just use a fin that goes straight onto your barefoot.

So a skin diving fin's essential here. Also you can see here, we have got the mask and the snorkel itself. It is worth spending a bit of money getting a good, good quality made.

You can see some of the kinds of fun colors that are available in now. A lot of women like a kind of a slap strap on the back of the mask because if you have got longer hair like Jack has here, then you tend to find that the rubber mask strap rubs against the hair. So these neopryne covers are really kind of helpful.

And as you push the mask over the back of the longer hair, it works really well. So obviously when you are skin diving or snorkelling, you will find that it is as easy to get cold as it is when you are diving. So some sort of a wet suit is a really good idea.

Also protects you against kind of marine life injuries, jelly fish, things like that. So a full length three mil wet suit like Jack is wearing here is absolutely ideal and it is going to keep you warm and also keep you buoyant while you are snorkelling. So you are safe on the surface here.

If you are skin diving, which is where you actually go below the surface, then some sort of a white belt around the middle here is a good idea. Just to offset the buoyancy of the wet suit itself. So that is a guide to snorkel gear. .