MermaidMichelle
03-31-2014, 02:15 PM
So you know you can swim, but want to know how it feels to swim like a mermaid without committing too much money too early? A monofin is the logical starting choice, but they are often inaccessible or too expensive to use as an experiment. Flippers are far easier to find and more affordable, but using them with a mermaid tail provides neither the feel nor the force which is needed. To achieve proper mermaid swimming, has anyone here tried to make a pair of flippers into a monofin?
I have. Here is my result, and the only chance you shall have to see my face on here for the next several months:
1973119732
I posted these on another thread, but they really need to be here too! :mermaid kiss:
Well, they certainly look...amazing...but how do they function? (Which is to say, do they function at all?)
The answer is a resounding "sort of." You notice that this pseudo-monofin is neither the breadth nor the material of a Competitor. Actually, it came from a pair of rubber/neoprene swim fins from Canadian Tire which I purchased in May of 2006, just before I quit life guarding, and welded together in August of 2009 just as I was starting to get to know my friend Isis (a model/fashion designer who was always interested in mermaids and described a mermaiding shoot as her "dream shoot"). Crafting anything mermaid-tail-related out of the better swimmable materials can be dangerous, and even this was not really an exception; I used a 2-dollar cigarette lighter to melt the edges of the fins and weld them together (manipulating the melting parts with a tool so as not to burn my skin). Would this hold up in the water?
Mermaiding has sadly been on the backburner for most of my life, so I didn't actually try out this monofin until years later, but when I actually did at the local aquatics centre it held up pretty well. I've always been a rather strong swimmer, so I put it through far more rigours than most first-time mermaids would dare: I speed-swum-breathheld with it, hovered with it, flipped head-over-fins with it, and even tried breaching with it (it wasn't really strong enough, unless you count head, shoulders, and a bit of torso out of the water a "breach"). It is here that the two main problems with flipper-monofins became apparent:
i) Many flippers have some degree of positive buoyancy and this was no exception. I had to rely on my arms to pull me underwater because otherwise my fluke would be kicking air.
ii) Cetacean legs fused into a fluke for a reason; they generate far more force swimming as one, and this force can be too much for individual swim fins to handle.
After about 45 minutes of my doing everything I ever dreamed of doing mermaid-style, part of the welding was beginning to come loose and one of the inner support struts had broken. I first noticed this while swimming; I suddenly didn't have the force to hover as effortlessly as I had before. Examining the damage once I was in the change room I determined that it might be possible to swim in the monofin again without intermediate repair; though after enduring what it did, it would not be quite so effective in future.
All in all, I'm glad that I took this approach. This whole endeavour cost around 20 USD, so the price was reasonable when weighed against what I got out of it. If someone was gentler with their monofinning than I was, they could probably gain considerably more use out of it at peak effectiveness than I did. Still, it is probably better to buy a professional monofin...at least if one can find/afford it!
Does anyone else have experience in this area, or am I the only one crazy enough to try it?
I have. Here is my result, and the only chance you shall have to see my face on here for the next several months:
1973119732
I posted these on another thread, but they really need to be here too! :mermaid kiss:
Well, they certainly look...amazing...but how do they function? (Which is to say, do they function at all?)
The answer is a resounding "sort of." You notice that this pseudo-monofin is neither the breadth nor the material of a Competitor. Actually, it came from a pair of rubber/neoprene swim fins from Canadian Tire which I purchased in May of 2006, just before I quit life guarding, and welded together in August of 2009 just as I was starting to get to know my friend Isis (a model/fashion designer who was always interested in mermaids and described a mermaiding shoot as her "dream shoot"). Crafting anything mermaid-tail-related out of the better swimmable materials can be dangerous, and even this was not really an exception; I used a 2-dollar cigarette lighter to melt the edges of the fins and weld them together (manipulating the melting parts with a tool so as not to burn my skin). Would this hold up in the water?
Mermaiding has sadly been on the backburner for most of my life, so I didn't actually try out this monofin until years later, but when I actually did at the local aquatics centre it held up pretty well. I've always been a rather strong swimmer, so I put it through far more rigours than most first-time mermaids would dare: I speed-swum-breathheld with it, hovered with it, flipped head-over-fins with it, and even tried breaching with it (it wasn't really strong enough, unless you count head, shoulders, and a bit of torso out of the water a "breach"). It is here that the two main problems with flipper-monofins became apparent:
i) Many flippers have some degree of positive buoyancy and this was no exception. I had to rely on my arms to pull me underwater because otherwise my fluke would be kicking air.
ii) Cetacean legs fused into a fluke for a reason; they generate far more force swimming as one, and this force can be too much for individual swim fins to handle.
After about 45 minutes of my doing everything I ever dreamed of doing mermaid-style, part of the welding was beginning to come loose and one of the inner support struts had broken. I first noticed this while swimming; I suddenly didn't have the force to hover as effortlessly as I had before. Examining the damage once I was in the change room I determined that it might be possible to swim in the monofin again without intermediate repair; though after enduring what it did, it would not be quite so effective in future.
All in all, I'm glad that I took this approach. This whole endeavour cost around 20 USD, so the price was reasonable when weighed against what I got out of it. If someone was gentler with their monofinning than I was, they could probably gain considerably more use out of it at peak effectiveness than I did. Still, it is probably better to buy a professional monofin...at least if one can find/afford it!
Does anyone else have experience in this area, or am I the only one crazy enough to try it?