Well, I feel like I ought to put in my two cents worth, seeing as how I go by JBDivmstr. 
I have to agree with those that state that being ‘relaxed’ and comfortable in the water is one of the keys to… well, not drowning. 
Good point and well worth bumping the thread for. Kudos!
In cold water seas I could see swimming ability being rare in sailors due to low survival rates if the water is cold enough. If you won’t live long enough to be rescued/reach shore there’s really no point, is there?
Tropical seas…? Predators? Dunno.
As someone who has always been VERY comfortable in water, I always thought - like the OP - that everyone really could swim and fear of water was silly… until I met my wife who truly has a fear of drowning.
In fact if you really think about it, for anyone without the confidence/comfort and some ability to really swim, the idea of jumping into a body of water that is 10 to 100 feet deep or more is kind of terrifying! You have nothing but your ability to remain afloat from dying what would be a horrific death.
I was raised around water and never really thought about it that way, diving off boats in deep lakes and even swimming in the ocean has always been second nature but I think about it a lot differently now… you are only one mistake of being helpless and dead. :eek:
Dog paddle is the intuitive idea that if one pushes the water away from ones face, the face may move away from the water. 
Ha, well its probably an attempt to copy Australian crawl.
Australian crawl, the crawl, what all the swimmers do in freestyle events for the most of the race , is a very difficult one to learn… it takes months of practice to get to the stage of being able to do it. Its popular choice by teachers BECAUSE you must learn kicking first.
Why must you learn to kick first ?you can’t learn aussie crawls stroke first, because you can’t have floatation assistance when learning the arm movement, and building the muscle for it…
But you can learn the kick for aussie cral when using flotatiation assistance.
So I figure you’d never really try to do aussie crawl unless you can do the kick already.
Why must it be aussie crawl first ?
Suppose they taught backstroke first.
Very strong arm strokes… So if you never learn to kick properly, you could still do backstroke ok. But run out of puff after 100 meters. Same with the others.
Breast stroke is more graceful and they could teach it… also way useful to learning under water swimming, what to do when you realise that you are under water and you’d better start swimming … !Breast stroke tends to hurt the knees of people who are learning (discourages learners "I’ve got a doctors certificate to say I can’t do it !) until they build up leg muscles to cope, so that might be why they don’t like to teach it first.
This sounds highly suspect. Dogs and cats are terrible swimmers; they just happen to be horizontally oriented with raised heads and thus unlikely to drown.
In theory, my college wouldn’t graduate a student that couldn’t swim. I say in theory because I’m sure their were handicapped students that were exempt and instructors that would sneak a passing grade to someone that didn’t earn it.
This was set up in the way they structured their PhysEd requirements. During the first week of school all freshman had to go to the gym for a swimming test…the test consisted of swimming a lap and then treading water for 5 minutes ( which is harder than it sounds ) Before the test they demonstrated a treading technique they called drownproofing.
If you passed that test you then could sign up for whatever Phys Ed class you wanted for your one mandatory course…archery, ice skating, whatever. If you failed the swim test you HAD to take swimming as your Phys Ed, and in theory you had to pass your Phys Ed course to graduate.
This was my though; most non-ape, swim-capable animals mentioned are 4-on-the-floor with necks that allow the head (airholes) to be raised well above the rest of the body. Sometimes when you see a dog or cat swimming, not much more than the snout is above water. So these anmals don’t need a lot of bouyancy to stay afloat. add to that, swimming motion is essentially walking motion.
Humans and apes, OTOH, swimming motion is not really walking motion, you are not even the same orientation; the airholes are below water and holding the head up in water is a very awkward tilt of the neck.
Nevertheless, it seems the dog paddle would be the elementary stroke requiring the least practice and coordination.
At least we see brainzzz float to the surface, even after 10 years.
My mother was a teacher on a small island (not a Caribbean one) before I was born and being able to swim was a baseline expectation in my family.
Excuse me, but I’m quite sure exhaling is instinctual, or unconscious if you prefer. I’m fairly sure you do it in your sleep. You can, of course, override the unconscious control of your breathing, though at most only until you become unconscious.
I knew what stroke you were talking about based on your description, but I had never heard the term “Australian crawl” before. FYI, it’s also known as the American crawl, though I wasn’t even familiar with that term - I’ve always just called it “freestyle” or just normal “swimming.” At least according to Wikipedia, the stroke was first introduced to the Western world by Native North Americans, so calling it “Australian” while speaking to an international audience might not be the best way to make yourself understood.
All that said, while in a situation where my swimming ability was being evaluated, I spontaneously taught myself the stroke based on just mimicking the way I’ve always seen good swimmers swim. I might not have had perfect form, or been a world-record contender, but I was able to swim quite efficiently and effectively over a long distance. So, it might take months to master it and start winning races, but it can be learned quite easily, IME.
My wife is firmly convinced that the crawl is actually called freestyle. She won’t believe me no matter what I tell her that freestyle just means you can do any stroke you like, and that the crawl is just the fastest. She was a competitive swimmer, too.
My stepfather never understood why growing up in Minnesota my sister and I can’t swim, but we can’t. Some people just can’t. I can dog paddle maybe half the length of the pool but after that I don’t have enough energy to exert to keep myself afloat.
Almost no fishermen in Western ireland knew how to swim. It wasn’t considered to be helpful, and goinfn to the beach wasn’t done.
I grew up on a beach on Lake Huron, and we all learned to swim without being taught, but of course, we had examples to watch. However, my suspicion is that even without that we’d have learned to get around in the water well enough. Fear and panic are the main impediments; once you get past those, it’s trial and error. Swim well with style? heck no. Able to get where you need to? Sure!
I’ve always been skinny; when I graduated high school I was 6’2" and weighed 135, and a lot of that was muscle since I worked out regularly. I guess my BMI was around 15, but I could still float (vertically, barely). My guess is that anyone who really can’t float has a nasty weight problem, or reduced lung capacity.
Above, folks talk about floating or not, but I’ve noticed that few people test it correctly – if you can’t swim or tread water, you’re unlikely to know because you can’t regulate your height in the water well enough. You have to get near equilibrium before relaxing; otherwise you’ll bob up and down (and think you’re “floating” two feet below the water level).
The other thing is you have to do it vertically, and of course, with as deep a breath as you can take without discomfort. I used to float with the waterline to my forehead. Now it’s between my nose and eyes (at 180 lbs, little of it muscle, 38 years later). My feet still sink when I float on my back; I have to propel myself to keep them up.
This is in fresh water. In salt water, everyone floats quite a bit higher.
The other thing is, people who can’t swim have a strong tendency to try to keep their heads out of the water. This is the worst way to try to swim or stay afloat, especially for more than a few minutes. Even though it has little fat, our heads are quite bouyant (no idea why, but it’s definitely true). Trying to keep it out of the water causes us to sink, so this tendency is counterproductive.
Very young kids aren’t strong enough to swim without putting their faces in the water. Despite growing up on the water, I hated putting my face in the water (more I think because it felt cold). By age 8 or 10, I could get around in the water quite well without doing that, but at the expense of a lot of wasted energy. Fortunately, I got over my reservations, and swimming got a lot more fun and easy.
Above someone mentioned the Great Salt Lake, but it’s not a nice place to visit. Instead, consider the Dead Sea in Israel, if we’re to believe Rudy Maxa.
In the Age of Sail seamen in the Royal Navy were often recruited by impressment (ie conscription). Merchant sailors were prefered, but in time of crisis it could take the form of basically grabbing able-bodied men off the street in port cities. Knowing how to swim wasn’t considererd an essential skill, and the general attitude was that there wasn’t any point in teaching the men how to swim since that would just make it easier for them to desert.
Yet another anecdote : I wasn’t taught to swim, nor as a child nor at school. As a teen I took some swimming lessons at the nearby swimming pool, quickly forgotten.
At 20 I could “swim” for some meters, then my legs would go down and became useless. I could use my arms to keep my head outside the water for some meters more, but that was the full extent of my swimming ability.
Contrarily to most others in this thread I’m not and wasn’t affraid of water. I just didn’t know how to swim. I remember that once I had asked a friend how to improve, he asked me how I was breathing, and I realized that I stopped breathing completely when “swimming”, for instance (despite having the head out of water all the time). So, it wasn’t innate, and I didn’t learn by myself, either.
I had to be taught to swim as an adult. Maybe toddlers can swim instinctively, but if my example is typical, children and adults can’t anymore.
As I just wrote, you’re wrong. You were taught how to swim very early, I never had been. So you can’t extrapolate your experience to people who never had swimming lessons. Maybe some people are able to teach themselves how to swim (Although I’m not sure why someone would do so, given that there are normally plenty of people able to teach you), but it certainly wasn’t true in my case. I remember as a kid, looking up in an old dictionnary depictions of swimming movements and trying to reproduce them without any success (As I wrote, I didn’t fear water and probably endangered myself many times practicing water related activities from childhood to my 20s)
ETA : When I think of it, not knowing how to swim might be sometimes the cause of a fear of water, rather than its result (you’re not accustomed to water and know you can’t stay afloat if you enter it anyway, maybe experienced swallowing water several times when you tried : why wouldn’t you be affraid?)
Yeah, I don’t buy the reasoning that it’s better to drown than swim. Even a wooden tall ship had ship’s boats and would launch one for a MOB.
But I’m sure that in general, if you fell off a tall ship, you were toast. Soggy toast. If you’ve ever sailed and tried MOB drills, you’d know it’s damn hard to find something in the water, in any kind of weather, unless it sticks way up and is really bright.
Yet another point : even floating on your back isn’t obvious when you don’t know how. Some part of your body (head, legs, whatever) is going to begin to sink in quick order, and moving in disorderly ways to keep it at the surface worsens the situation.
As obvious as it may seem to people who are accustomed to it, even the correct position to just float has to be learned