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Thread: Tanks & Tails: Revisiting Mermaids Scuba Diving

  1. #1
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    Tanks & Tails: Revisiting Mermaids Scuba Diving

    Recently posted a link to a long video, made about 15 years ago but the video - to my knowledge - was never posted before. It shows two mermaids scuba diving in clear warm oceans, going to great depths with standard Scuba gear except buoyancy compensators. (In a future post, I’ll have something to say about that…)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jiFYmxmk10


    What struck me was the elegance of the ladies diving with Scuba gear while wearing mermaid suits. The traditional view was always that tanks and tails don’t mix because tanks impede dolphin swimming and look silly. Well, to me these ladies don’t look silly at all, rather moving gracefully and very relaxed in the deep. They can afford to be relaxed - they don’t have to rush back to the surface every few minutes :-)


    So I’m going to collect links showing mermaids scuba diving - not that there are many - and post them here as I find them. And I also hope to re-start a discussion about the topic of tanks and tails.
    I think the mermaid community misses something interesting here.

    Conversely, the general scuba diving community totally - and I mean totally!! - ignores merfolk. I looked at a big scuba board and searched for 'mermaid' . Found 168 links - but all referred to a live-aboard vessel with this name or mermaid statues etc. Not one to what the merfolk community is doing.
    Too bad, the two communities share a common love for water and the ocean…



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  2. #2
    Senior Member Euro Pod Echidna's Avatar
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    actually, many mers are scuba certified as you need to be if you want to swim/work in certain places.
    It's not that dolphin kick and tanks are mutually exclusive (even though it exacerbates poor technique, since it willl get you used to kick from your knees), but that most mers aspire to give the illusion (and of course have the feeling) of being the real thing.

    And that is only possible with freediving. If you prefer scuba, nothing is holding you back
    but I do appreciate being free of equipment and technical shenanigans.

  3. #3
    I think it depends on the tank size. At some point it will be long enough to get in the way of your legs.

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by fabianfrz View Post
    I think it depends on the tank size. At some point it will be long enough to get in the way of your legs.
    I agree with this for sure. I was SCUBA certified when I was young so the tank was huge on me by comparison, but when I tail swim I don't personally use a lot of my core muscles. So I don't think I would have an issue with dolphin kicking with a tank. In fact, my mersona is something of a crossover with the steampunk world and I planned to get re-certified with SCUBA and start diving again to bring two of my favorite worlds together. And I want to get a tank that would fit in my mersona's world so I can dive in my gorgeous custom tail but with a tank.
    The Magical Mystical MerFanc
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  5. #5
    Since I dive Sidemount it would likely work also with my long 12L tanks but I would have to try. The same tank on the back would likely not work.

  6. #6
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    I think a 63 cubic foot tank is ideal for normal sized adult mermaid divers. The tanks in that video look like 80 cf tanks and are a little long.

  7. #7
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    12 liter is very big, indeed.
    Thanks for mentioning sidemount - I wasn't aware of this new trend and looked it up. Interesting..
    Last edited by johnleeex; 05-27-2020 at 10:50 PM.

  8. #8
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    Buoyancy Compensator (BC) (or lack thereof) and mermaid scuba diving..

    The mermaids in that youtube video I mentioned at the beginning of the thread do NOT wear BC's. I have some observations about that. First one, of course, is that it looks much sexier for my male eyes than a BC hiding the curvy upper body of a female diver. No surprise there. But what I find interesting is that it works so well. For scuba divers who grew up learning to dive in the last 40 years the idea of diving without a BC is just ridiculous. But I've been diving even longer than that and when I first began scuba diving, the first BC (just converted life vests then) were coming into use. For about ten years - into the eighties- the divers using BC were ridiculed for being wimps, incompetent, uncool, even cowards. Eventually the advantages of a BC won everyone over, of course. But the drag of a BC makes a big difference in how fast you can swim. It looks that the much more powerful thrust of a good monofin makes it even easier to dive without a BC than we did in the old days using floppy bi-fins. Of course, hovering motionless in the water column or floating inches about the bottom without moving doesn't work without a BC. But it works well enough, it seems. I even know a story of a bin-fin dive buddy with a BC who got into trouble in a strong current and his mermaid buddy (no BC, just scuba) just dragged him out of the current with the power of her tail.
    Anyhow, curious what the experienced divers/merfolk think about BC less mermaid diving.
    Last edited by johnleeex; 06-04-2020 at 04:35 AM.

  9. #9
    I know nothing about scuba diving, sounds like it would be fun. Although I see all these posts here about tank sizes and and a buoyancy compensator leaves me thinking: It sucks that we humans require air. I sometimes wish that I had the ability to simply put on my mermaid tail, dive into the water (lakes, rivers, and oceans) and take my time down there exploring.

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