The helmet is placed on your shoulders and is held as you descend, so you never feel its full weight.
Snuba diving is supposed to be a bridge between snorkeling and Scuba diving. However, it is a chimera that has all the disadvantages of scuba diving, and all the limitations of helmet diving, with none of the advantages of either. With scuba and snuba diving you wear a mask, rather than a roomy helmet. Therefore, beards can be tricky, and glasses are out. Unlike helmet diving, both snuba and scuba diving require you to know how to swim. Both snuba and helmet diving are limited by a hose, but scuba isn’t. With both snuba and scuba diving, your dry air comes from a tank which can lead to dry mouth if you are even slightly thirsty. Because you are breathing through a tube in your mouth, you become more aware of having to breathe. This causes the novice diver to use up their air too quickly and thus cutting short their undersea adventure. Helmet diving has regular surface air without end. Breathing through one’s nose automatically humidifies the air and avoids the dry throat situation.
Both scuba and scuba diving involve a mouthpiece. Therefore, lip reading, mouthing words, even smiling to others becomes very hard. This is one of the reasons that special scuba hand signals become vital to safety and communication. This is one of the reasons helmet diving inherently safer, easier and therefore more enjoyable.
Snorkeling, snuba diving and scuba diving are only different methods of getting underwater. Your purpose, why you are underwater, is far more important. Our purpose is to create fun by getting the fish to be near us and interact. This requires making friends with fish using food. There was a snuba operation here. As it was run by scuba divers, nice ones I will add, they are conditioned by the mind-set of their training and are discouraged from making friends with sea creatures. They may scatter food to create a buzz, but this mob behavior does not lead to having trusting relationships with individual creatures. In fact, mindless fish feeding can lead some fish, especially at popular snorkeling spots, to nip humans in an effort to prompt them into dishing out the food. They will be bold, but not friendly. If you reach out to touch them, they will swim away. On the other hand, some of our fishy friends allow themselves to be touched or held. Many will pose in your photos. Think outside the box!