Hawaii

Provided the hurricanes doesn’t wipe out Cozumel and Grand Cayman, can you help me with tips on snorkeling in water 10-15ft? I have seen different types of masks and snorkels, some with caps on top. I just want to conserve energy and get the best experience I possibly can. How are disposable underwater cameras?
* Miranda and JoeD thanks so much!

* Cloud G you need to find something better to do with your saturday nights!

* DickJones Excellent info, you are almost neck and neck with Derick.

* Mo> good idea about giving my gear to the local kids. I was already considering buying my own gear on ebay. Thanks!

* tech3surfman> preesh 8 it! You were all very helpful and I am getting really excited about my trip.

I just went snorkeling in Key West, it was pretty cool.

Snorkeling’s fun and not hard to figure out once you get in the water. You’ll have a mask on your face that covers your eyes and nose. The snorkel is just a tube that hooks on the side of your goggles. One end goes in your mouth and has little rubber prongs for you to bite and keep it in your mouth(don’t bite through them). The other end stays above water if your floating face down.

They’ll probably have some kind of defogger for you, but a good idea is that once you get in the water you leave the mask on your face. Taking it off and on gets more moisture in it and makes it fog up easier.

You’ll have flippers on, when you kick, you kick in a scissor motion with stiff knees. Like you’re trying to push the water behind you with your flippers.

You’ll probably have some kind of floatation vest called a boyancy compensator. Which is basically an air filled(or not) life vest which you can blow into for some extra floatation, or keep it flat if you like to dive down a lot.

So basically you just float in the water face down and kick around a look at stuff while breathing through your snorkel. Dive down here and there to check out things up close.

When you resurface after diving down you can just blow the water out of you snorkel by sort of speaking a "Teh" sound into the snorkel. This is much quicker than taking your head out of the water and dumping the snorkel. Just practice and you’ll figure it out.

At the one we went to we were instructed to not swim through water less than 7 feet deep so large waves wouldn’t make us bob down onto the rocks and coral.

I didn’t have any luck with the underwater disposable camera I used.