Before you spearfish — this comes first
- Get proper instruction before you spearfish. A recognised freediving or spearfishing course teaches the things that actually kill people in this sport, and reading about them is not the same as being taught them.
- Dive with a buddy, and dive one up, one down — one diver in the water, one on the surface watching them, every dive. A breath-hold blackout is silent and gives no warning; a watching buddy is the difference between an incident and a fatality.
- Stay inside your own training and experience. Depth and breath-hold times are personal, they change day to day, and nobody else's numbers apply to you.
- Understand the conditions before you enter the water: visibility, current, swell, tide, boat traffic and your exit. Conditions decide whether a dive is reasonable far more often than skill does.
- Use equipment you have been shown how to use, check it before every session, and be visible — a marked float and line are how boat traffic knows you are there.
- Never extend a dive for a fish. No catch is worth pushing a breath-hold, and the urge to take one more second is exactly what a blackout feels like from the inside — which is to say, like nothing at all.
Snorkels, gloves, socks and hoods
Explainer · Last reviewed 2026-08-18
The small items, each solving one specific problem — and the snorkel carries a safety rule most self-taught divers have never been told.
Safety
Drowning and immersion — Can cause serious injury or death
A snorkel left in the mouth during a descent is a hazard rather than a convenience: an unconscious diver with a snorkel in their mouth has an open airway to the water. Hoods, gloves and socks each add buoyancy that the weighting was or was not set for.
What reduces it: Take the snorkel out of your mouth before descending — this is standard freediving practice and it is taught for exactly this reason. Re-check weighting when adding or removing a hood, gloves or socks.
Hypothermia — Can cause injury needing treatment
Most heat is lost from the head and the extremities, which is why these items change endurance out of proportion to their size — and why losing a glove or splitting a hood shortens a cold-water session sharply.
What reduces it: Carry spares of the cheap items, and end the session rather than continuing cold. Cold impairs the judgement the rest of the safety system depends on.
Precautions that always apply here
- Never spearfish or freedive alone.
- Dive one up, one down: one diver down, one on the surface actively watching, every single dive.
None of these is interesting individually and all of them decide whether a session is comfortable enough to last.
SNORKELS for freediving are simple: a plain tube, no purge valve, no dry top, and a soft flexible section is optional. Complexity adds volume and failure points, and neither helps somebody who is going to take the snorkel out of their mouth anyway.
AND THAT IS THE RULE. The snorkel is removed from the mouth on descent, or at least is not relied on. A diver who blacks out with a snorkel in their mouth has an open tube leading to their airway; a diver without one has a closed mouth and a laryngospasm reflex that may keep water out. Recognised freediving training teaches removing it, and it is one of the clearest examples of a practice that looks like fussiness and is not.
GLOVES protect against rock, spines, fish teeth and cold, in roughly that order of frequency. Thickness trades warmth against dexterity, and dexterity matters because cold clumsy hands are the hands that will have to release a belt or use a knife.
SOCKS provide warmth and, as importantly, a barrier between foot and pocket that prevents the rubbing that causes blisters and cramp. A fin pocket sized without socks will be too tight with them.
HOODS matter more than their size suggests. A large share of heat is lost through the head and neck, and an attached hood on a two-piece suit removes the neck gap that flushes cold water down the diver's back with every movement.
Why these are bought before the gun
The equipment-order page makes the argument in full and it is worth restating here: exposure protection and the small items decide how long somebody can safely stay in the water, and a gun decides nothing at all if the diver is cold after twenty minutes.
A beginner in a borrowed suit with no hood, no gloves and thin socks will be uncomfortable within half an hour, will stop paying attention to conditions, and will make the poorer decisions that cold produces. That is a worse outcome than having a less powerful gun.
The practical order that follows: mask and snorkel, fins and socks, suit with hood, weights and belt, float and line, knife — and then the gun. Every item before the gun is either a prerequisite for being in the water or a piece of safety equipment.
Authoritative guidance
Stated by a fisheries authority, scientific institute or recognised angling body. Authoritative, but summarising rather than demonstrating.
- AIDA International freediving education and safety standards — AIDA International (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving equipment standards including snorkel practice and thermal protection.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- RNLI water safety guidance: cold water shock and Float to Live — Royal National Lifeboat Institution (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Water safety guidance on cold water exposure and its effects.Background and mechanism onlyPassage read and verified
Where to go next
Where it matters
- Shore divingA cold diver makes worse decisions about conditions and about when to stop.
- SpearfishingPersonal kit that changes thermal endurance and buoyancy, both of which are safety variables on a breath-hold.
What these connections rest on (2)
Authoritative guidance — 2 connections
Stated by a fisheries authority, scientific institute or recognised angling body. Authoritative, but summarising rather than demonstrating.
Shore diving
Cold is a judgement problem before it is a comfort one.
- AIDA International freediving education and safety standards — AIDA International (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving equipment standards including snorkel practice and thermal protection.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Spearfishing
A membership assertion rather than a topical one: this record teaches the discipline or its equipment, so the discipline's mandatory safety posture applies to it.
- CMAS technical and sporting standards for underwater activities — Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (Standards body)Relied on for: Breath-hold spearfishing as a defined discipline with its own technical, equipment and safety standards, set out by the international underwater federation.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- DAN guidance on freediving safety, hypoxia and shallow-water blackout — Divers Alert Network (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: That the safety requirements of breath-hold diving apply across the discipline rather than to particular equipment or techniques within it.States this directlyPassage read and verified
How this compares
- Suits, masks, fins and cutting toolsThe parts of the diving interface that are not the mask or the fins, and what each is actually solving.
- Wetsuits, fins and masks for spearfishingThe snorkel is removed on descent, because an open tube to the airway is a hazard in a blackout.
What these connections rest on (2)
Authoritative guidance — 2 connections
Stated by a fisheries authority, scientific institute or recognised angling body. Authoritative, but summarising rather than demonstrating.
Suits, masks, fins and cutting tools
The small items decide how long a session can safely last.
- AIDA International freediving education and safety standards — AIDA International (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving equipment standards including snorkel practice and thermal protection.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Wetsuits, fins and masks for spearfishing
A practice that looks like fussiness and is not.
- AIDA International freediving education and safety standards — AIDA International (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving equipment standards including snorkel practice and thermal protection.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Practitioner consensus — 1 connection
Widely and independently recommended by experienced anglers and specialist sources. This is real angling knowledge, not proof: controlled evidence for it is limited, and FishingHQ records it as convention rather than as a demonstrated effect.
Suits, masks, fins and cutting tools
An explainer carrying a mechanism the equipment record depends on.
- CMAS technical and sporting standards for underwater activities — Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (Standards body)Relied on for: Breath-hold spearfishing practice, equipment convention and the safety expectations set out by the international underwater federation.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- BlueWater Hunting and Freediving — BlueWater Freedivers, Ventura, California, 1995 (Practitioner report)Relied on for: Spearfishing equipment and practice: gun, shaft, tip and rigging choice, and the handling of a shot fish, from a practitioner tradition distinct from the European one.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
Sources for this page
- AIDA International freediving education and safety standards — AIDA International (Water-safety or diver-training authority)Relied on for: Freediving equipment and safety practice.Background and mechanism onlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
How FishingHQ labels evidence is explained in the evidence policy.