This is interesting to me because I’ve never been able to swim under water, even when I was younger and not so blimp-like. I’ve always floated.
I’ve actually fallen asleep floating on my back in a pool. I don’t think it’s possible for me to drown in calm water. I would die of hypothermia or get eaten by a shark first.
Two of my cousins drowned in childhood. (Mom was one of seven kids, and dad one of four, so I have LOTS of cousins) I could have been a third, having wandered off as a toddler to be found near a large irrigation canal.
As a result my parents made teaching me to swim a high priority…it also kept me out of trouble in the summers.
When I got to high school, we did a swimming unit in gym class and out of 30 or so kids I was one of 3-4 that could swim without wasting energy holding my head completely out of the water and such, and the only one of those that wasn’t on the school swim team.
I’m pretty sure that if you took that other 90% and threw them fully clothed (a big factor that I didn’t noticed mentioned yet) into water over their head more than a few of them would drown. In a speedo I can tread water indefinitely…about the same exertion as walking. In street clothes I wouldn’t want to find out, but I suspect I’d bonk after 10-15 minutes. In boy scouts we did the drill of pulling off my pants and inflating the legs, and you have to be pretty comfortable in the water to do that. Wet jeans don’t just slip off, and it is pretty easy to get them stuck around your ankles. I saw a couple of kids panic while trying it, and as mentioned upthread, once you panic things go to shit in a hurry.
Eff science and “facts” – not everyone floats all the time in every conceivable condition.
There was a recent thread about ability to float and swim. It turns out that floating for a lot of people is a hugely active process … much, much more than laying back and letting it happen. For one, you’re supposed to keep your lungs as inflated as possible. When people talk about floating, it’s rarely mentioned that if you exhale – and also if you don’t hold your legs and back just so – you could potentially sink rapidly. Not everyone experiences all this in the same way, so “easy floaters” wonder what’s up with people who don’t float well/easily.
Concur with the panic.
My husband is a rescue diver on the FD and has told me that they are taught how to kick and push a panicking person away from them since they have a habit of trying to climb on top of you, therefore pushing you down.
Though, to be honest, if they’re called out, it’s a recovery, not a rescue, so he’ll rarely face that situation.
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Non-swimmer here.
It’s basic human fear … if you are afraid of anything at all, you should well understand fear of water/swimming.
Lungs filled with water hurt like hell … severe pain is a great impetus for fear.
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Unfortunately people who have not been trained in survival situations in the water won’t know to take their clothes off and I doubt it would occur to many people not so informed. I wonder if it’d even occur to them to lose their shoes. (This all assumes of course you have reason to believe you’ll be in the water for some time and shore or a boat are not very easily available.)
Inflating your pants thing is a very helpful tool. You can even blow air into your shirt to help float you. Sadly the people most likely to drown are the ones who likely have never gotten such information because they can’t swim in the first place.
I have no doubt the fear is real and incapacitating.
Thing is, as mentioned, swimming is a human instinct. Go to YouTube and search for babies swimming and you can see plenty of examples. We have an inbuilt diving reflex so babies just hold their breath as a matter of instinct. They even swim too (not very well but they naturally will propel themselves). They even seem to enjoy it.
As adults we learn some fears. If you do not “know” how to swim and fall in the water your brain tells you that this is dangerous, you might die and you freak. A natural reaction and understandable to be sure. Thing is most drowning people (assuming they are conscious and not otherwise injured) are actually on the surface splashing about. They rapidly exhaust themselves doing this and then really drown. For some reason never occurs to them that they are floating and breathing and if they just chilled out a bit they could continue doing so a lot longer.
I get that freaking out turns off such higher thinking but therein lies the rub. The panic is killing you. This is true in so many situations and the key to survival will be to master that, force yourself to chill out and assess the situation and do the best you can. You may still die but by far the better chance for survival lies down that road.
Interesting topic. This is why the US navy doesn’t teach swimming to non-swimmers-they teach floating (i.e. 'drownproofing"). If you fall off a ship at sea, swimming will not save you-but calmly floating will.
As others have said, it is the panic that dooms you. if you relax and float, you stand a good chance of being rescued.
So I had to be taught to swim, because for the longest time, my brilliance was getting in the way.
I like the other guy’s explanation better.
Inasmuch as your “brilliance” was telling you to panic because you “know” you cannot swim and will likely die then yeah. If your brilliance is such that you overcome your panic and manage to float till someone rescues you then great.
As I noted swimming is an instinct. Babies who have never been in water do it. Animals do it even if they have never been in the water before.
If you mean swimming well and efficiently then yeah…that needs to be taught. For this I am more thinking keeping yourself afloat till rescue.
Eh? Born and bred in the UK, and like almost anyone I can think of who is similar I’m perfectly capable of swimming.
If TV and movies have taught me anything, it’s that the proper way to rescue a panicked swimmer is to punch him in the face. Because nothing calms someone down more than getting punched in the face.
Some of the posts on this thread have been a little harsh on those that can’t swim, IMO.
They drown because they’re dumb and/or scaredy-cats.
But it’s like with many other skills. I mean: surely there are skills that you guys lack that are fairly self-evident with a little practice. But you’ve simply never practiced.
I myself can swim, but pretty badly. At school this was the reason, ironically, that I would often avoid swimming lessons: my recollection of the lessons was that everyone else could already swim and the “lesson” would be about doing lots of lengths. When for me, a single length was exhausting and embarrassing.
And now, as an adult, opportunities to practice don’t come up very often. There are always hotties at my local pool: I don’t want to start experimenting with bouyancy / trying different swimming techniques because I may draw attention to my lack of swimming ability (Yeah, yeah “don’t be self-conscious” – easier said than done).
Finally (this has been a much longer post than I anticipated…), it’s all very well saying that someone should be calm when falling into water, and realise they have bouyancy, but they have only seconds to get that right.
And say if they try to tread water and momentarily bob under the water: they may think that they aren’t doing it right and then give up on the idea. And then panic.
Panic is understandable and natural. We are all subject to it. I have had a few occasions for real panic while in the water so I get it (not kidding…panic was my initial response for a few seconds).
The point is that panic that will kill you in the end. You might drown anyway even if you do not panic but your chances of drowning increase substantially if you do panic.
But panic, as an uncontrollable fear, is an acquired thing. Babies and young animals do not panic. They are not innately afraid of heigths, water or politicians. If they grow up familiar with these things they will not be afraid of them. But if they grow up for years with no contact with certain things then they may panic. I believe our living protected and predictable lives means we panic more easily.
A few times I have been stuck in an elevator and had someone panic. I mean, come on, you are safer in a stuck elevator than walking in the street.
This is exactly what happened to the brother of Caspar David Friedrich (the German Romantic painter)–he tried to rescue Friedrich from drowning (when he was a young boy), but Friedrich in his panic pushed his brother underwater and drowned him. Friedrich felt guilty for his brother’s death for the rest of his life (a variation of survivor’s guilt, I suppose), and some scholars suggest this incident influenced the rather melancholy moods of his landscape paintings.
What’s even more disturbing is that he seems to have a second head (or a third arm) growing out of his neck!
It’s true that babies to some extent take naturally to swimming. It’s not true that you have to be an adult to get into trouble. Drowning is one of the most common causes of death among children.
Little tangent (but I was just reading a diving thread). I remember a very experienced diver recalling how in the great majority of air-sharing incidents he’d been involved in (almost none of which involved his dive-buddy), the person needing air would simply grab the regulator out of his mouth (rather than use the auxiliary / octopus), obviously putting their rescuer in serious danger.
Based on his advice when I was getting my dive gear I set it up so my normal-use regulator is on an extra long yellow hose (for ease of the grabber) and the octopus is integrated into my inflator hose (since I’ll be the one who ends up using it). 
My dive instructor told a story of having a guy grab the regulator from him and clamped on to the instructor as well. The instructor quickly realized he was totally screwed so he inflated his BC and shot to the surface.
I know…not good but the instructor of course exhaled all the way up. Once at the surface the panicked guy let go. The instructor immediately dove straight back to the bottom.
Panicked guy apparently avoided an embolism somehow but got the bends for his stunt (which by all accounts I have read is very painful). The instructor, because he immediately went back down, was spared that particular agony.
Maybe just a story he told to scare his students…I dunno. Sounded true when he said it though.
ETA: This was all told during the training that when buddy breathing (no octopus, only one regulator) the diver with air still in the tank ALWAYS holds on to the regulator…even when the other person is breathing. The story illustrated that sometimes you do not see the panicked person rushing you and grabbing it out of your mouth.
I live in the UK, and only had the local swimming pools to learn in, but that’s enough. It’s fairly unusual to be a complete non-swimmer here.
Of course, swimming pools aren’t actually the only place to swim here. We are an island.