Seems like you can float on your back forever, without really getting tired. When people drown in lakes or oceans, why can’t they just float until someone rescues them? I get it if you’re wearing clothes heavy with water, but if you were already swimming, or at least dressed for it…?
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I think the basic flaw in the thinking is that you do get tired even when floating. It is not nearly as tiring as actively swimming, but few people can truly float, without any movement at all, without some minor hand or leg movement. Advanced swimming and lifesaving courses require demonstrating the ability to float for an extended period of time because it isn’t actually totally effortless. And they do that in a calm pool usually where they do not have to fight waves.
The most stable position for most people is called the “dead-man’s float”, which is where the person is face down in the water and the high point is the air-filled lungs, but this requires holding the breath and periodically raising the face above water every minute or so. It is a very low energy, last-ditch method, perhaps most useful in agitated waters where the person would be fighting to get the face above water basically constantly anyway. Going totally loose for a minute at a time (relax all muscles and just go where natural ballast will take you, at or slightly beneath the surface), with a brief arm/leg kick and head push to get air, can be less effort in some situations.
A person with a reasonable level of fitness and some idea of how to do it almost effortlessly can float for many hours and avoid drowning, definitely. However, everyone has to sleep eventually and few people can go a full day without sleep. Unless you are in extremely quiet water, you won’t keep your face out of the water without interruption unless you are actively making sure of it. Failure is inevitable, a matter of when more than if.
Toss in loss of body heat to the water, and fatigue and inability to keep your face above water so you can breath because extremely difficult with passage of time.
Also, having clothes when falling in on can be useful. Take off your shirt and pants, tie off the ends of the arms/legs, fill the inside with air, and wet clothes can be used as a make-shift flotation device. Not a great one, but better than nothing at all. Another advanced swimmer training method.
A few reasons.
* Drowning typically happens to people with little experience swimming, like children, or when more experienced swimmers become cold or exhausted. We have some weird instincts that are really counterproductive in water – our [instinctive drowning response](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinctive_drowning_response) makes us go vertical in the water and claw upwards with open hands, head thrown back, in a last-ditch effort to keep our mouths above water, which is extremely inefficient and pretty much does the *opposite* of staving off drowning.
* That vertical-in-the-water process is usually silent, too, so if you see somebody like that, don’t think they aren’t drowning just because they aren’t splashing around and screaming for help.
* *Panic* is the natural and all-too-common response to an open-water situation, by most people. When panic happens, instinct takes over, ergo: drowning response, rather than calm, efficient backfloat.
* ETA: **There are more non-swimmers (or non-competent swimmers) than you might think.** A [Red Cross survey](https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-release/red-cross-launches-campaign-to-cut-drowning-in-half-in-50-cities.html) determined that while 80 percent of Americans say they can swim, only about half of those who claim they can are actually competent – and the bar they used is pretty low. The 5 required skills (which ~65% of Americans **cannot do**) are just:
* Jump or step into water that’s over your head.
* Return to the surface and float or tread water for 1 minute.
* Turn in a circle to find an exit (from, e.g. the deep end of a swimming pool).
* Swim 25 yards to an exit.
* Exit the water.
* Most humans aren’t neutrally-buoyant (“naturally floaty”) in fresh water. Individual people have different densities (more lean muscle mass = denser, generally). Higher density relative the to water = less buoyancy.
* Only about 7% of us naturally float in freshwater at normal lung volume. So even a backfloat requires a bit of effort.
* We’re more buoyant in salt water (up to 69% would float in sea water), which is denser because of the salt, but even regular seawater doesn’t keep everyone afloat all on its own.
* Point being, **even a backfloat takes** ***some*** **energy** and concentration to maintain.
* Waves and currents are a thing. Natural bodies of water aren’t swimming pools. Ever try doing a dead-still backfloat in a public pool when there are kids roughhousing nearby? Kind of hard to do a minimal-effort back float when waves keep washing over your face.
* Bodies of water are nearly always cold, or at least colder than us. Humans need to maintain a constant internal temperature (homeostasis) to function.
* Water has a great capacity to absorb heat and is far more efficient at conducting it away from our skin than air would be.
* You’re therefore unlikely to get hypothermia in 65F air (unless it’s very windy or you’re wet), but you CAN get hypothermia in 65-degree water. You can get some level of hypothermia in 80-degree water if you’re in it long enough.
* This is a big part of the reason you’re hungry and tired after a day of hanging out in the pool, even if you didn’t move around much.
* When you get cold enough, your body closes shunts in the arteries that feed your extremities, in order to keep warmer blood in your core and preserve the function of your primary organs.
* That means your brain stops working well (because it’s apparently not on the list of primary organs). You don’t think so good when you get hypothermic.
* That also means your arms and legs stop getting enough oxygen to actually be capable of movement. Kind of hard to keep swimming when your muscle cells literally lack the fuel to contract.
So, yeah, under perfect conditions you could float for a VERY long time, but not indefinitely:
* If the water was very salty (you’d start to have problems with osmoregulation as saltwater sucks moisture out of your outer layer of skin and mucous membranes (lips and similar) and will eventually break it down completely) and just the right temperature, like in the Dead Sea or a sensory deprivation tank, you’d fix the buoyancy and hypothermia issues.
* If the water was completely calm.
* If you were completely calm, and knowledgeable enough about swimming to do a competent backfloat.
But most drownings occur under much-less-ideal conditions.
There’s a darn good reason [most states](https://www.boatsafe.com/pfd-requirements-state-boating-regulations/) have rules requiring flotation devices for boaters, or at least for children. Even if you panic, and help doesn’t arrive for a long time, it’s a LOT harder to drown if you’re wearing a proper lifejacket.
I think most comments are missing a really basic thing: waves. Lakes and oceans are not a calm pool where you can just laze without a care in the world.
How well you float on your back depends a lot on your level of body fat, and not just body fat, but also the AIR IN YOUR LUNGS.
If you’re having trouble keeping water out of your stomach and lungs because it’s splashing into your mouth and nose, you can drown rather quickly without waiting for your “skin to dissolve” or whatever other nonsense. Bonus points if you hit your head on something and lose consciousness.
Aside from people not being able to swim and the cold (which will kill you – potentially quite quickly depending on water temp), unless the water is perfectly still, floating *isn’t* that easy.
I enjoy floating in a local lake. The waves often crash over my head and drag me down a little, at which I’ll have to force my way into a position where I can clear my nose + mouth and get back to floating. It’s not *exausting*, but I also couldn’t do that for more than a few hours at a time. (Which would be enough to get to shore, but not enough to survive indefinitely.)
I did a personal survival course at school, and it is difficult to float for a long time. You can take off your trousers and tie a knot in the leg ends, then put your arms into the legs, invert the trousers and ram downwards into the water to create a float. Even so, as clothes get heavier with water, you will tire, and relax, possibly get cramp, and as your body relaxes, it shuts down slowly to keep your core warm enough to survive. People either die in the first panic, or go to sleep with cold and exhaustion, and drown as the body loses its will to live.
Try it. You float as long as your lungs are full, but you sink when you breathe out. Unless you can hold your breath forever, you can’t float forever.
When the titanic sank, the huge death toll wasn’t from people drowning. It was because the ocean is cold, and in that region it’s especially cold (which is why it can have icebergs to begin with). Water saps away your body heat much faster than air. In cold water, you can be dead in minutes.
People can and do tread water or float for days.
But you need to know how.
And you can’t do it while sleeping.
So not forever.
That’s not taking into account waves, cold water, or other difficult conditions.
You can in fact stay afloat for a lengthy period of time in the ocean but…..bad things happen. Look up what happened to the USS Indianapolis for a sad tale.
My mom never learned how to swim but, bless her, taught me how to float in the bathtub and then made sure I had (cheap) lessons at a sacrifice. I’m a scuba diver now. Thanks, Mom.
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