This has been driving me nuts. What do you call this stuff?
First of all, I'm slowing accepting (thought it makes me really mad) that people have come to think of "diving" as only Scuba Diving, and that diving without tanks is "just snorkeling". Since I consider tankers to be wimps and tourist, not really athletes so much as people trying to be submarines, this reall smarts, but there it is.
So we have "free diving". Except that as soon as you mention that everybody wants to know how deep you've gone, as though free diving is only depth competition. Where as I tend to think any diving done without prostheses to be "free diving", in the way that climbing without mechanical assists is "free climbing". More confusion.
Then you get spearfishing into the mix. Half the "free diving" sites and magazines turn out to be about spearfishing. Which is definitely an awesome extreme of free diving, allright...but a little narrower than the term should suggest.
Should we cook up a new term for diving without using air tanks? Or more carefully define the terms we already have? Or just get used to the confusion?
First of all, I'm slowing accepting (thought it makes me really mad) that people have come to think of "diving" as only Scuba Diving, and that diving without tanks is "just snorkeling". Since I consider tankers to be wimps and tourist, not really athletes so much as people trying to be submarines, this reall smarts, but there it is.
So we have "free diving". Except that as soon as you mention that everybody wants to know how deep you've gone, as though free diving is only depth competition. Where as I tend to think any diving done without prostheses to be "free diving", in the way that climbing without mechanical assists is "free climbing". More confusion.
Then you get spearfishing into the mix. Half the "free diving" sites and magazines turn out to be about spearfishing. Which is definitely an awesome extreme of free diving, allright...but a little narrower than the term should suggest.
Should we cook up a new term for diving without using air tanks? Or more carefully define the terms we already have? Or just get used to the confusion?