As a "vintage snorkeller", I'm always pleased to read about the use of fins, masks and snorkels for forward propulsion on the surface as well as for descent to the depths. Everybody knows that fins provide swimmers and divers with extra power, speed and manoeuvrability. But what about the fourth benefit of fins: endurance? Fins also enable people to swim and float in the water for extended periods of time without succumbing to fatigue. The modern inventor of fins, Louis de Corlieu, didn't come up with the idea of "propulseurs de natation" (swimming propellers) to win swimming races. He intended them to be life-saving, water rescue devices. Where the priority is survival, endurance matters much more than any other benefit.
If you're looking for literature about the use of fins, masks and snorkels for long-distance swimming, I would recommend the following book:
Swimming Free: On and Below the Surface of Lake, River and Sea.
Geoffrey Fraser Dutton. William Heinemann Ltd, London. 1972. Hardcover, dustjacket, 154 pages.
What can we do with ourselves-what is there to do-once we have learnt to swim? I hope to answer this question in the following pages. I hope to show that there exists for every swimmer a new and unsuspected world-not thousands of miles away or hugely expensive but here under his nose in river, lake, sea, even in pond and ditch and flooded meadow, available now with the simplest of equipment. You no longer have to brave frigid waters-warm rubber suits are for all; with fins and mask and snorkel you enjoy a confidence and freedom of the water never before offered to Man. You merely need to have learnt to swim-well. Then you can begin to look around you, at your new inheritance.
I offer in these pages a personal solution-but it applies to everyone who longs to explore aquatic worlds more imaginative than s weimming pool, and more accessible than the Red Sea; and who wishes simply to swim, and not be burdened with expensive specialized apparatus. It should whet the appetite of those who are not yet competent swimmers, and refresh those who are happy just to be beside loch, river or sea-everyone, surely, who finds adventure in our despoiled terrestrial environment becomes ever less satisfying and ever more mechanical. Here is simplicity and freedom, uncontaminated, unsuspected.
Above are the opening paragraphs of a British book published over three decades ago and written by a man who climbs, skis, walks and swims as he travels. The volume focuses on what the blurb on the dustcover calls "adventure swimming", namely swimming in open waters, such as rivers, lakes and the sea, with the aid of fins, mask, snorkel and wetsuit, while hiking and camping across country. What he describes largely resembles what has come to be called "swimhiking" in the new millennium. I admire this book because it is very much "before its time" and because its robust portrayal of snorkelling as a cold-water means of getting from A to B while enjoying the view above and below the waves is so different from some people's perception of snorkelling as an activity confined to remote, expensive, warm, tropical resorts on ocean islands devoid of culture and nightlife, an exclusive pursuit for the overpaid, the effete, the very timid and the very young.
The activity of swimhiking has a strong connection with the part of the United Kingdom where I live, the North East of England. There's even a book about swimhiking hereabouts: "Swimhiking in the Lake District and North East England" by Peter Hayes:
