Why do divers carry knives?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “sea hawk dive knife“
About Camila
Written by: Camila
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Why do divers carry knives?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “sea hawk dive knife“
About Camila
It started out as a “macho” thing. Having a huge knife strapped to your leg to show people how “real” men went diving.
Then it evolved into a more reasonable thing as a way to cut fishing line that had been left behind. I actually used a small dive (3 inch blade) a couple of times and let me say that cutting fishing line is not that easy. The next step up is a pair of rust proof scissors.
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I used my diver’s knife for it’s intended purposes on several occasions.
If you’re unlucky enough to live in an area where fishermen like to just abandon old nets in the water then you’ll regularly see coral with a ghost net tangled around it. This will trap most of the sea life that lives in the coral, and then more critters that come to eat the unfortunates.
Luckily a small team equipped with knives can make short work of the net without damaging the coral and freeing the trapped wildlife.
Important tip: ensure you have bags for transporting the net afterwards or you’ll become an imprisoned critter on the way back…
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Freediver here (ditched the SCUBA tanks a long time ago). I’m an avid spearfisher and I dive a lot in Greece. On all my dives I carry a small Blackie Collins knife with blunt tip. The purpose of the knife is threefold: 1. To dispatch any catch quickly and with minimal suffering; 2. To tackle gear (spearfishers carry quite some gear – ropes, cords, etc); 3. As an emergency measure in case I get entangled in something underwater – monofilament, fishing net, rope, etc.
I always remember a scene from reading the memoirs of diving pioneer Hans Hass. He describes one experience wherein he’s freediving somewhere in the tropics and carries no knife. He gets entangled in a monofilament underwater which tightens in a loop at his ankle and keeps him underwater. He keeps presence of mind and instead of struggling to get free, patiently unties the knot while almost suffocating. Close call.
Carrying a knife underwater, especially when freediving, is mandatory.
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This is a great question with many answers. I managed a chain of dive shops for seven years and then worked at a dive equipment manufacturer for ten. While there, I managed many dive knife projects, so this is an area with which I am intimately familiar.
Yes, having a knife while diving is a smart idea because you never know if you might get entangled in monofilament line which may be unbreakable. Here in Northern California, getting tangled in kelp is a nuisance, although easily prevented and broken by hand if need be. But, for some, having a knife provides some extra measure of security. That said, in the hundred of dives I have done all over the world, I have never had to use a knife to save my life, either from monofilament, kelp, or deep sea demons.
What I have used dive knives for is as follows:
Cutting up sea urchins to feed fish until my body was completely covered with a mass of seething fish, from small to large, all trying to get to the sumptuous roe.
Prying scallops off of rocks
Supporting my manly stature of certified diver, because surely without a dive knife, I would be drummed out of the corps.
In the dive shop, I have also sold a few hundred knives to neophyte divers stating the following vitally important reasons for buying one:
Surely you will get caught one day in monofilament line so by selling you this knife, I am saving your life. You’re welcome.
Demon kelp will likely entangle your legs and with a knife you will be able to hack it to shreds and thereby escape its evil clutches.
And, you wouldn’t want to be branded as a n00b who didn’t know enough to carry a knife, would you?
What these new divers (mostly men) didn’t know what that within the industry, we had an inside joke that compared the size of one’s dive knife in an inversely -proportional relationship with a certain part of the anatomy. It was our passive-aggressive way to laugh at the manufacturers, and buyers, of dive knives that were designed to be ridiculously oversized (see photo of the U.S. Divers SeaHawk Americana-Series Dive Knife).
Luckily, sometime in the 1980s, knife manufacturers got smart and started making smaller, more functional knives that worked much better for what they were actually intended for, which apparently was not fending off great white sharks. I could write volumes on this subject, but will leave it right here.
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Divers carry knives for their safety. We suggest that all diver always carry some sort of knife when diving to deal with such things as entanglement in kelp, fishing line, rope, etc.
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Because people like to dump stuff in the ocean that can tangle up a diver, and if the diver can’t get loose before running out of air, the diver spends the night with Davy Jones. And he doesn’t let guests leave in the morning. Creep.
A knife can let you cut your way out of an old fishing net, a tangled bit of old anchor or buoy rope, or underwater weeds that get snagged on your equipment.
Sure, it’s better to just stay clear of that stuff. But you may not have more than a few feet of visibility and something may be drifting with the current you’re swimming around in.
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A dive knife is a tool that when you need it will be irreplaceable, but most of the time is something that is so easily overlooked that it will either rust in between dives because you failed to wash the saltwater off it, or you will finally discover the thing is missing after a dive and end up with a really neat, but empty, shealth to strap to you leg because it color coordinates your dive gear.
Is it important? No really, if you are used to driving your car without a spare tire; or seeking out long, steep staircases without handrails and racing down them; or, feel good about eating street food in Third World countries; think that if you smuggle illegal meds just one time you will not get caught.
Having a dive knife will not insure that you can get out of an entanglement BUT it will certainly increase the odds. I had a divemaster friend who was snagged (by a fisherman on a fishing boat that passed by and ignored our dive flags (both types)) and he could NOT get to his knife because he was being dragged backwards with a hook through his fin. He survived and we got the Coast Guard involved and they taught the boatload “the rules” about divers in the water.
So, the moral of the story is “better to have one and not need it than to NOT have one”… just like having a spare tire with air in it.
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Easy. When the big shark shows up you stab your buddy so that he bleeds and you swim in the other direction.
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The short snswer is that you never know what you’ll need it for. One example would be to cut yourself free of an entanglement such as rope or fishing line that may be free floating near you where you’re diving. This can happen while penetrating wrecks.
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