Do you need to know how to swim to snorkel?

If you cannot swim and you have a snorkeling trip booked, what you are really after is permission. That is a reasonable thing to want, and worth knowing: almost everybody answering this question online is also selling you a seat on a boat.

We are not. So here is the answer first, then the reasoning — which turns out to be the more interesting half.

The honest version of that answer

You lie face down. You breathe slowly through a tube. You stay still enough to see something. Done properly, snorkeling is the least athletic activity available in the ocean, because anyone who thrashes about frightens away everything worth looking at.

So the mechanics really are within reach of somebody who has never swum a length, which is why every operator in every resort will hand you a vest and take you out. Two things sit underneath that, though.

The first is that snorkeling in the sea does not end where it began. Wind moves, current moves, boats swing on their anchor. Every season people get in at a beach, look down for twenty minutes, look up, and find the shore further away than they left it. A swimmer treats that as an annoyance. A non-swimmer needs somebody to come and get them, which is a plan only if somebody is watching.

The second is calm. Water will get into your mask or your snorkel — not might, will — and whether that is a non-event or an emergency depends on whether you can handle it without your heart rate tripling. That is trainable, it takes half an hour in a pool, and almost nobody does it before flying.

So: can a non-swimmer snorkel? Easily. Should this non-swimmer get into this water today? That is the real question, and unlike the first it has a different answer on different days.

Start here: which of these are you?

Four situations, four different answers. Find yours and you can skip most of this page.

• Booked on a boat trip, cannot swim at all. Go. Wear the vest, and tell the crew before you board rather than once you are in the water. The section on guides below is yours.
• Can swim a bit, not confidently, going in from a beach. Your risk is not sinking where you are, it is ending up somewhere else. Read the section on choosing where you get in.
• Fine in a pool, nervous about the sea. Your problem is probably the equipment. Start with how to snorkel without swallowing water.
• Shopping for flotation before you travel. A snorkel vest is the right answer for nearly everyone here. Our guide to snorkel vests covers which one, and snorkel vest versus life jacket covers why the jacket on the boat is the wrong shape.

What actually happens to snorkelers who drown

This is the section nobody writes, and leaving it out is why most advice on this question stays shallow.

Hawai’i keeps better records on this than anywhere in the world, because it has a very large visitor population doing a great deal of snorkeling. Between 2009 and 2018 the state recorded 712 fatal ocean drownings, of which 392 — 55% — were non-residents. Snorkeling was the most common activity involved, at 206 deaths, ahead of swimming at 142; of those 206, 189 were visitors and 17 were residents. Ocean drowning accounts for 45.7% of all fatal injuries among non-residents in Hawai’i, against 4.0% among people who live there.¹ If you came to this page frightened, that is the number that justifies it.

Here is the part that changes what the fear should be about.

In 2017 the Hawai’i State Department of Health set up a subcommittee to work out why these deaths kept happening in calm water, close to shore, to people showing no sign of struggling. Its Snorkel Safety Study concluded that most snorkel-related drownings are not drowning as anyone pictures it. They are hypoxia brought on by rapid onset pulmonary edema — fluid moving into the lungs from the body’s own circulation, driven by the effort of drawing breath through a narrow tube while lying chest-down in water. It develops in minutes, and in the study’s words it comes with “few if any signs of distress”.²

The study also surveyed people who had got into difficulty and survived. Most respondents were Hawai’i residents, under 55, strong swimmers and experienced snorkelers. Of the thirty-six who completed it, “no one cited lack of swimming or snorkeling experience as a contributing factor,” and the report concludes that it “does show that drownings happen to even the most experienced of watermen and women”.² A later round found that 88% of 131 survivors judged their own swimming ability to have been sufficient.³

Swimming ability is real protection against one kind of drowning, and close to no protection at all against the kind that actually kills snorkelers. It protects you if you drift, if you tire, if a current takes you, if you have to get back to a boat. It does not protect you against breathing resistance, an undiagnosed heart condition, or exertion in cold water.

That cuts both ways. What you are frightened of — sinking, because you cannot swim — is not the main mechanism; and if you can swim a bit, that is not the reassurance the rest of the internet is selling you either.

So how much swimming ability is enough?

Nobody gives a straight answer, so here is a real standard you can test yourself against in a hotel pool. Water Safety USA — a coalition whose members include the CDC, the US Coast Guard, the American Red Cross and the United States Lifesaving Association — defines water competency as “being able to anticipate, avoid, and survive common drowning situations,” and lists five basic swimming skills:⁴

1. Enter the water and return to the surface
2. Control your breathing
3. Float or tread water
4. Turn around in the water
5. Move to safety and exit the water

Read it again and notice what is not there. No stroke, no distance, no speed. The whole list is about not panicking and getting out.

If you can do all five, your decision is about conditions rather than ability. If you cannot — and most people who call themselves non-swimmers cannot manage the first or the third — that is not a bar on snorkeling. It is information. It tells you that everything protecting you comes from outside your own body: the vest, the water you chose, the person watching. Get all three right and you are fine. Get one wrong and there is nothing in reserve.

If you do one thing before you travel, learn to float on your back and breathe. Not swim. Float. Most adults get there in one or two sessions, and it is the skill that turns a bad moment into a boring one.

Flotation, and the one thing a snorkel vest will not do

A snorkel vest is a light inflatable collar or jacket you fill by mouth through a tube at the front. Let air out and you sit lower; put air in and you sit higher. That adjustability is the point, because a vest holds you at the surface while still letting you lie face down. A life jacket does the opposite — it holds you upright with your face clear of the water — which is exactly wrong for looking at a reef.

That is why a vest is the right buy, and which vest is the subject of our snorkel vest guide. If you are weighing one against the life jacket stowed on the boat, snorkel vest versus life jacket works through the trade honestly.

Now the limitation, because nobody selling vests states it. Flotation that holds you at the surface is not flotation that protects your airway. The US Coast Guard’s classification separates devices that “will turn MOST unconscious wearers face-up in water” from the lighter classes, which are “not designed to turn unconscious people face up in water”.⁵ The newer performance-level system is blunter: the buoyancy-aid class is “not recommended for weak or non-swimmers” and has “no self-turning ability”.⁶

A snorkel vest belongs to that lighter family. It will keep you up. It will not roll you over, and it will not rescue you. That is not an argument against wearing one — it is an argument against treating the vest as the whole plan. The vest handles buoyancy; a person watching handles everything else.

And keep it on. Most near-misses I have seen start with somebody taking a vest off in shallow water because it is hot, or they feel conspicuous, or they want to duck under. Seawater helps — it is denser than fresh water, so it holds you up more readily⁷ — but not that much.

Where you get in matters more than how well you swim

If you take one practical decision from this page, take this one.

Choose a lifeguarded beach. The United States Lifesaving Association puts the chance of drowning at a beach with lifeguards at roughly one in eighteen million.⁸ Nothing else available to you moves the odds like that, and it costs nothing.

Beyond that, here is what I check before I take guests into the water. I guide on the Adriatic and have spent years reading these conditions for people of every ability, so this is the list I actually use, in the order I use it.

Wind, not waves. Waves tell you what happened an hour ago; wind tells you what the next hour looks like. Onshore wind is uncomfortable and safe. Offshore wind looks calm from the beach and is the thing that moves people away from it without their noticing.

Where the water is going. Stand and watch for two full minutes before anybody gets wet. Look for a channel where the surface is darker, flatter or choppier than the water either side of it, or a line of foam and stirred sand heading out. That is water leaving, and a non-swimmer has no business in it.

Entry and exit. A sandy slope you can walk in and out of beats a better reef reached across rocks. Getting out is the part nobody plans and always the harder half — tired legs, a bit of swell, something sharp underfoot.

How far you would have to come back. Not how deep. Depth stops mattering the moment you are floating, and a meter of water will drown somebody as efficiently as thirty. Pick a spot you would be content to be towed across.

Cold. It makes you breathe faster and tire sooner, and both feed the mechanism above. A rash guard or a shorty is not vanity below about 24°C.

If somebody local tells you today is not the day, believe them over any forecast. I have called off more tours for wind a guest could not see than for every other reason combined, and nobody has ever thanked me at the time.

Two things you will be told that are wrong

“Get a full-face mask, they’re easier for beginners.” This is the most common advice given to nervous first-timers, this page used to give it, and we no longer do. Of the thirty-six people who told the Snorkel Safety Study about getting into trouble, 66% were using full-face masks and 83% of those believed the mask contributed to the problem. The study also records that a full-face mask cannot be removed easily in an urgent situation even where it has a quick-release, that you cannot spit out a mouthpiece you do not have, that you cannot clear it with a sharp breath out, and that its resistance to your breathing cannot be judged by looking at it.²

A conventional mask and a simple snorkel are what we would put a non-swimmer in. Breathing through any snorkel is more work than breathing air, because the tube holds a volume of your own exhaled breath that you draw back in on the next cycle.⁹ The simpler the tube, the less of that there is to fight.

“Just stay where you can stand.” It sounds like the safest possible instruction and it produces two bad outcomes. It puts people in the surge zone, where a knee-high wave knocks a standing adult over far more easily than it moves a floating one. And it puts feet on live coral and sea urchins — bad for you, worse for the reef. Floating in three meters of water with a vest on is safer than standing in one. Depth is not the variable; flotation and distance are.

Going with a guide, and what to ask before you book

For a first time as a non-swimmer, a guided trip is the right answer, and the reason is supervision rather than instruction. The difficulty is that “suitable for non-swimmers” means almost nothing as a marketing phrase — everybody says it. Four questions separate the operators who mean it:

• “How many guides are in the water with the group?” In the water, not on the boat. One guide swimming with eight people is a real answer. “The crew keeps an eye out” is not.
• “Do you provide flotation, and is it a snorkel vest or a life jacket?” Either beats none, and an operator who has thought about which has thought about you.
• “Where do you go when the wind is up?” A good operator has a bad-weather site and names it without hesitating. One who says “we always go to X” is not going to turn the boat around.
• “Can I stay near the boat?” The answer should be an immediate yes, with a suggestion about where.

Then tell them. Say the words “I can’t swim” to an actual person before you board, rather than to the water afterwards. Nobody is judging you — I have taken out guests who had never had their face in the sea, and it is an ordinary Tuesday. What a crew cannot do is manage a risk it was not told about, and the person we watch most closely is always the one who told us.

When not to get in

Most pages on this subject stop before this section, because most of them are attached to a booking form. Here is the list.

• The wind is offshore and rising, whatever it looks like from the beach.
• You can see a current. A visible channel of water heading out is not a manageable risk without a stroke.
• There is no flotation and nobody will lend you any. Do not improvise with a float you cannot hold on to once you are tired.
• Nobody knows you cannot swim. Fix this before anything else. It takes one sentence.
• You are on your own. Not “with people nearby” — with one specific person whose job is you.
• You feel breathless, unusually tired, or tight in the chest, at any point. Get out and tell somebody. Breathlessness arriving without exertion is the early stage of the mechanism the Hawai’i study describes, and it does not announce itself with a struggle.² It is also the symptom people talk themselves out of.
• You have a heart condition, or are being treated for blood pressure, and you have not asked a doctor. The study found a significant correlation with cardiac disease, frequently undiagnosed until after the incident, and separately raises recent long-haul air travel as a possible contributing factor — carefully labeled hypothetical rather than established.² We are not doctors. That is a conversation for before the holiday, not during it.

None of this means don’t go. It means the decision is about today, not about you.

Frequently asked questions

Frequently asked questions

Do you need to know how to swim to snorkel?+

No. Snorkeling is done floating face down on the surface, breathing through a tube, and it asks for no stroke at all. What it does ask for is flotation you keep on, water you have chosen deliberately, and one person who knows you cannot swim and is watching you. Get those three right and swimming ability is not the deciding factor.

Can you snorkel if you can't swim at all?+

Yes, and it is done every day. A guided boat trip with a snorkel vest is the usual route, and it works because somebody whose job is you is in the water alongside. The change from "can" to "should" happens with the conditions rather than with your ability — offshore wind, a visible current, or nobody watching are all reasons to stay out on a given day.

Is snorkeling safe for non-swimmers?+

It is safe under conditions you can check, and it is worth knowing what the real risk is. Hawaii's Snorkel Safety Study found that most snorkel-related drownings are caused by rapid onset pulmonary edema rather than by inhaling water, and that among the people who reported getting into trouble, none cited a lack of swimming or snorkeling ability as a factor (Snorkel Safety Study). Swimming protects you against drifting and tiring. It does not protect you against a breathing or cardiac problem, which is the mechanism that kills most snorkelers.

What flotation should a non-swimmer use for snorkeling?+

A snorkel vest. It is inflated by mouth so you can adjust how high you sit, and unlike a life jacket it lets you lie face down, which is the position you actually want. Know its limit — devices in this buoyancy-aid class do not turn an unconscious wearer face-up and are not recommended for weak or non-swimmers on their own (USCG PFD approval system). The vest handles buoyancy; a person watching handles everything else.

How deep is snorkeling, and does depth matter if I can't swim?+

Less than you think. Once you are floating with a vest on, three meters of water and thirty meters of water behave identically. What matters is how far you would have to travel to get back and whether anything is moving you. Standing in shallow water is often the worse option, because that is where the surge knocks people over and where feet land on live coral and urchins.

Should a non-swimmer use a full-face snorkel mask?+

We would say no. Of the people who told Hawaii's Snorkel Safety Study about getting into trouble while snorkeling, 66% were wearing full-face masks and 83% of those believed the mask contributed to the problem. The study also notes that a full-face mask cannot be removed easily in an urgent situation, cannot have its mouthpiece spat out, and cannot be cleared with a sharp breath out (Snorkel Safety Study). A conventional mask and a simple snorkel are the safer combination.

What should I tell a tour operator if I can't swim?+

Say the words, out loud, before you board rather than once you are in the water. Then ask how many guides will be in the water with the group, what flotation they provide, where they go when the wind is up, and whether you can stay near the boat. The person a crew watches closest is the one who told them.

Where to go next

• Choosing flotation: the best snorkel vests — what to look for, and what we would put a nervous swimmer in
• Vest or life jacket: snorkel vest versus life jacket, and why the boat’s jacket is the wrong shape for a reef
• The part that frightens people: how to snorkel without swallowing water — clearing the tube and the mask, and breathing calmly
• Starting from nothing: how does snorkeling work

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References

Footnotes

1. Galanis, Dan. “Fatal Ocean Drownings, 2009–2018.” Injury Prevention and Control Section, EMS & Injury Prevention System Branch, Hawai’i State Department of Health, health.hawaii.gov. ↩

2. Wilcox, Carol, Philip R. Foti and Ralph S. Goto. “Mysterious Snorkel Drownings Explained: Snorkel Safety Study Interim Report,” July 2020. In cooperation with the Hawai’i State Department of Health, the Hawaiian Lifeguard Association and the Hawai’i Tourism Authority, snorkelsafetystudy.com. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Lou, Alicia. “Snorkel Safety Study Sheds Light On Unexplained Drownings In Hawaii.” Honolulu Civil Beat, 8 July 2022, civilbeat.org. ↩

4. “Water Competency.” Water Safety USA, watersafetyusa.org. ↩

5. “Life Jacket Types.” BoatUS Foundation, boatus.org. ↩

6. “New US Coast Guard PFD Approval System.” NRS, nrs.com. ↩

7. Pawlowicz, R. “Key Physical Variables in the Ocean: Temperature, Salinity, and Density.” Nature Education Knowledge, vol. 4, no. 4, 2013, p. 13, nature.com. ↩

8. “Rip Current Safety.” National Weather Service, NOAA, weather.gov. ↩

9. Toklu, A. S. et al. “Ventilatory and metabolic response to rebreathing the expired air in the snorkel.” International Journal of Sports Medicine, vol. 24, no. 3 (2003): 162–5. doi:10.1055/s-2003-39084. ↩