I’m not sure what you’re describing here. Laying on the water, or treading? I’m not so worried about laying on the water. I can do it well enough that I don’t drown (it basically turns into a gentle swim), but it does require the movement you’ve described. (I point out my example because I’ve seen plenty of people do it with a minimal of movement–so minimal it looks like almost no movement whatsoever. By this, I mean people who can lay back without their legs sinking.) It’s treading I can’t do without dying within five minutes.
It’s funny, but this thread has reminded me of my attempts at learning to swim as a kid. I seem to have the opposite reaction to a lot of people. If someone tries to “help” by trying to get me to lean back onto them to start floating, I can’t do it. Something about it scares me. I also don’t do well when I’ve been floating and try to get upright (for those suggesting newbies start in the shallow end so they can stand up); I can’t get my legs back under me and start to panic.
I didn’t finally learn to float or swim until my parents gave up and left me alone to bob around in the pool while they swam in a different part. I started moving around more and just sort of figured it out. I still have trouble getting back upright from floating on my back, but I’m a lot more comfortable and can keep myself from freaking out. It’d likely be better if I had more practice.
The problem with me is I sink like a rock. Why? I panic that’s why.
I can go into the shallow end of a pool or the ocean. I put one hand on the floor and I can float my body. My hand still stays on the floor of the pool or floor of the ocean. As soon as I move my hand away I panic and my whole body stiffens and I drop like a stone.
Humans naturally float. But I don’t cause I panic. Try it if you can float. Float around in the pool then all of a sudden tense all your muscles at once, I guarantee you’ll sink like a rock.
Your floating ability depends on the ability to calm your muscles
I wonder if it helps to learn in salt water as I did. My father took me out in the back bay behind Atlantic City. No one can sink in salt water, it ought to be easy to relax. I learned to crawl, but now cannot go more than maybe 50 yards on a crawl. A bit more on the breaststroke (not the butterfly, which I never could do), but I can go all day using the elementary backstroke. Now I do virtually all my swimming in the gulf off the west coast of Barbados where it is warm and very calm. A year and a half ago, I swam a half mile parallel to the beach, all using the backstroke. That one should be taught first since anyone can do it and you get used to floating.
Which is what happened in the link in the OP, of course. All of those people who drowned couldn’t swim. They didn’t plan on being in deep water, but there was a dropoff.
When I was a kid, I nearly drowned in a small lake. There was a blocked-off swimming area, and I didn’t go past that, but a small sinkhole or dropoff with what was also possibly a riptide-like current was near the edge. I was half-swimming, half-walking, and suddenly it felt like my feet were sucked out from under me. I could swim, but the current felt rougher than I could manage, and my uncle grabbed me and hauled me out. If I hadn’t had some swimming ability I probably would have just done the ‘reach for the sky’ method and gone straight under.
Even if you don’t plan on ever being in deep water, what happens if your kid runs into a river? You have to scream for help or stand there helplessly, or might drown yourself too if you rush in. If the vehicle you’re in plunges into a retention pond or river during an accident?
I’ll just add that I hate formal swimming, probably from childhood swimming lessons that weren’t taught well. My eyes are very sensitive to most pool water, I have bad vision and don’t wear contacts so I can’t see well when I’m swimming, and I’m afraid of getting water up my nose. But I can still swim. I was lucky because my parents could afford swimming lessons at the YMCA when I was little (and there was room in the classes), and my high school had a swimming pool, plus students were required to take two quarters of swimming in PhyEd classes before graduation. I had a friend who was a quarter short of that requirement his senior year, and was told that no, he could not (unlike many seniors) get out of the PhyEd requirement but instead had to take that last quarter worth of swimming.
You don’t have to be able to do all those different strokes, or swim underwater. Just please learn how to save (or help save) yourself should you find yourself in an emergency.
I think I can help here.
The first thing to do is get used to being in the middle of the water without putting your feet down or having your head out. Starting in the shallow end, just sit down under the water and open your eyes (if you shut them habitually). Allow yourself to feel what it’s like to just float mid water. If you sink like I do then use little crouching hops to moon walk around on the pool floor. Take a hop and stretch out in the water and kick or wave a bit to get used to being without purchase. I know that you can already do the forms in the shallow but this is more a psychological thing. Try pushing of the sides with your legs and torpedo-ing about under the water. You can always stand up if you get scared after all.
Next move to the drop off zone and do the same thing, just getting used to the feeling of NOT having your feet under you immediately. If you get frightened you can back up a stroke and gain your feet. If you can do this, then go back underwater and follow the pool floor down a bit and look up at the surface. You can judge how far it is and kick off the bottom to break the surface and take a breath. Jump back and forth like this a lot until your body realizes that the floor has no disappeared, it is merely too low to stand on without going underwater. You have to teach your lizard brain that it can’t have things both ways. Either you swim on the surface, or crawl about on the bottom, holding your breath. Once you can do that, you’re golden. 
I’m Australian, suffered through the misery of those classes, can’t swim, can’t stand the water and know lots of kids and adults like me. But as kids we had to hide it because sporty types pick on us non-sporty types. As a teacher, I knew many kids who never learned to swim, despite endless lessons. Those (often compulsory) lessons are torture to kids who are not naturally whatever it is which makes you able to swim easily - as is the ridicule from those who swim easily.
What would we do in deep water? We don’t go there. People who drown are those who think they can swim and then can’t do so well enough. People who can’t swim don’t take the same risks.
I hear so often from swimmers who can’t understand how others can’t swim. Yet I couldn’t understand how anyone, after years of maths at school, couldn’t do it. Swimming is instinctive to some. Maths to others. People will proudly say they are no good at maths. But being no good at swimming is something to be ashamed of. Why?
Because being no good at swimming is several orders of magnitude more likely to kill you than being no good at maths is.
[quote=“lynne-42, post:88, topic:549355”]
snip.
Because being able to swim, even badly, is one of those life skills that there isn’t any real excuse not to possess. It is not difficult and doesn’t require you to be “sporty” or even physically fit. Rudimentary survival swimming skills are something that might save your life. Being a poor swimmer is nothing to be ashamed of; being a non- swimmer who would panic and drown rather than learn a simple skill that is instinctual to most humans is.
I believe, besides having to do with amount of body fat, swimming with adequate buoyancy also involves a body’s center of gravity. The higher the center of gravity the more difficult it will be for a person to swim. Does that sound right?
I was at my favorite swimming pond last week and it’s a place where a lot of people bring their doggies to swim. Most dogs will just run and jump in but one young bassett hound was afraid. His owners had him in a life jacket (so maybe they had already given him the drowning talk and scared him, hee) and they were coaxing him into the water.
They said that bassetts are earth burrowers by nature and not accustomed to water like many hunting dogs are. His heavy chest and short little legs weren’t giving him much of an advantage either.
But by the end of the day he had gained some confidence and Mom and Pop were cracking me up with how proud they were of young hound. Who’s a good dawg?
See, even the doggie paddle isn’t an innate skill. 
This is the usual reply, but just doesn’t compute. I have been noting Australian drownings on the news for decades because of this argument, and the risks are going swimming where you shouldn’t or when intoxicated. I could mount a strong statistical argument that swimming involves a much greater risk of drowning than non-swimming!
I’d be more than happy to change my mind in the event of statistics showing swags of people who have drowned which would have been saved had they been able to swim. I can find plenty of examples of people who have drowned because they went swimming.
Don’t get me wrong - I would be keen to be able to swim and enjoy going in the water. I admire those who can swim well. I did manage to learn as an adult from a friend and got across a pool a few times. But that didn’t change my hating it. I just don’t think it is the issue it is made out to be, especially here in Australia, where being able to swim is assumed as integral to Aussie life.
What are the scenarios in which being able to swim might save my life? I have never worked that one out.
I don’t go into deep water, or even shallow if I can avoid it. I also don’t go fishing or boating - if I wanted to then I would obviously learn to swim.
I do acknowledge that my (over?) reaction to this topic is in part sour grapes because I was so lousy at swimming, and in part due to the misery of compulsory swimming lessons year after year at school.
… and as an example of what I was saying, there it *&^%$# goes again. With an added bonus of “shame” in the insinuation that it is a deliberate (“rather than learn”) choice :mad:
I was a good swimmer as a kid (I think swimming lessons are compulsory in UK primary schools, and I had evening classes too), but I haven’t been for nearly 10 years, and don’t know if I can still do it.
I imagine that if you dumped me in the sea, even if the water was warm, I’d panic too much about not knowing where the bottom is, and about creatures like jellyfish living in the water. I don’t think I would be able to swim.
Sure, I won’t argue with this. I’m not saying that being a non-swimmer makes you objectively likely to be killed by drowning. I’m just saying that there are situations in which a swimmer would be able to survive, and you wouldn’t. Swimming is a survival skill, and that’s why people feel it’s important. If you’re careful about avoiding water, it probably won’t be an issue for you, you are correct. (Probably.)
Here’s what I have a hard time mentally processing.
Not being able to swim and being even remotely exposed to water on any occasion. Unless I lived in a serious desert, I can imagine plenty of occasions that would scare the crap outa me. I think I would try really hard to learn to swim/float enough where water wouldnt terrify me (which it would I couldnt swim).
And around here, its amazing how many people who have drown are noted for not being able to swim. I certainly can’t imagine not being able to swim and being on a boat or a dock or wading in a creek/river/ocean/pond. Maybe a kiddy pool that has NO deep sections.
My condolences to people who have given a solid try at learning to swim and can’t.
Avoiding water won’t save you in the event of an accident though. You don’t have to be boating to suddenly find yourself in water deep enough to cause you problems. Here in South Florida we have loads of deep canals everywhere. It is a very real possibility that you may get run off the road and directly into one. It happens all the time here. If you can swim, you drastically improve your chances of surviving. If you can’t you are pretty much screwed. Likewise, we have monsoon rains and hurricanes that can cause massive flooding. Being able to swim will not only ensure you probably won’t drown if you are swept away or suddenly find yourself in deeper water than you’d like; it also opens up your options to rescue, travel, and procurement of resources in an emergency.
Say for example, you hiking with some friends, things have been dry and the rainy season is just starting. After a good hike a storm whips up and causes the little creek bed you crossed earlier to become swollen and deep with water. If you want to get back you’ll have to swim across. It’s not dangerous or fast, just too deep to wade. If you cannot swim, then your options are limited to: Sit there and wait for rescue, hike along the river and try to find a crossing which may or may not exist and probably lose the trail in the bargain.
I don’t maintain that everyone can swim well, or that they should enjoy it. I do think that there is absolutely NO excuse for not being able to at least tread water and paddle a bit to save yourself.
Bullshit.
I’m an excellent swimmer, but staying afloat is something that requires continual effort - not a whole lot of effort, but enough that it would exhaust me fairly quickly in a survival situation.
As a kid, I was tall and rail-thin. My legs are very long, and, no matter what position, or how full my lungs, they would sink and drag me under, straight to the bottom. Today, fifty years later, I have a bit more fat on my frame, but my legs still drag me down, to a vertical position where I float with just the crown of my head exposed. It is flatly impossible for me to maintain a float without deliberate movement.
I have always maintained a grudge against the Red Cross. I was a good swimmer, and wanted to take swimming lessons, but couldn’t get past the floating lesson, because their dogma was “anyone can float on their back with their lungs full of air once they learn the proper technique”. They insisted that I was doing something wrong, even though they could never tell me what, and wouldn’t allow me to advance to a class where I could have learned something.
I still bear a grudge against people who ignorantly insist that “anyone can float”.