What to Bring Snorkeling in Puerto Rico: The Full Checklist

Half the packing lists online read like you're provisioning an expedition. You're not. You are getting on a boat for a few hours in some of the warmest, calmest snorkeling water in the Caribbean, and if you booked a guided trip, most of the heavy lifting — gear, flotation, food, a crew that reads the water — is handled before you arrive at the dock. What's left is small, cheap and easy to get wrong anyway. So here it is, sorted the way we'd tell a friend: what you need, what's smart, what to leave at the hotel, and what you can cross off entirely.

The essentials

If you bring only these five things, your day works:

• Swimsuit — worn under your clothes. There are no changing rooms on a boat worth writing home about. Arrive wearing it and you've solved the morning's only logistics problem.
• Towel. The one item people forget most. The breeze on the ride home is glorious when you're dry and character-building when you're not.
• Reef-safe mineral sunscreen. Zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, applied before you board. More on why this matters — and the legal side — below.
• Water. Our trips carry drinks on board, but having your own bottle for the drive and the dock never hurts. Sun plus salt water dehydrates people faster than they expect.
• Dry change of clothes. Even just a shirt and shorts in your bag. The difference between a pleasant dinner after and squelching into a restaurant is one plastic bag's worth of planning.

Worth bringing

None of these are mandatory. All of them have earned their spot by making someone's day noticeably better:

• Rash guard. Our favorite piece of snorkel kit, full stop. You float face-down with the tropical sun on your back, and sunscreen wears off; clothing doesn't. One shirt blocks the burn, the rare jellyfish brush, and the need to reapply anything. If you pack one optional item, make it this.
• Non-drowsy motion sickness remedy, taken about an hour before departure. If you're prone, don't be brave about it. Take it before the boat leaves — once you feel queasy it's too late for the pill to help. Sitting low and midship helps too, and tell the crew; we cross these waters every day and will help you pick the smoothest seat.
• Waterproof phone pouch. The floating kind with a lanyard. Turtle videos are the most rewatched footage our guests take home, and a pouch is a fraction of the price of the phone it saves. Test it in the sink the night before.
• Small amount of cash. Useful for tipping the crew if the day earns it, and for anything you pick up around the marina. Boats are not ATM country.
• Hat and sunglasses — with straps. The ride out is breezy by design. Every season the sea claims a small fleet of unstrapped hats, and we cannot turn the boat around for them.

Leave these behind

Just as important as what goes in the bag:

• Valuables and jewelry. Rings slide off in cool water, necklaces snag on gear, and nothing about a snorkel trip requires a watch you'd mourn. Your things stay on the boat while you swim — safe, but the simplest security is not bringing what you'd hate to lose.
• Glass bottles. Bare feet, a moving deck, and glass are a combination with exactly one outcome. Our boats carry drinks, so you're not giving anything up.
• Drones — on the refuge islands especially. Culebrita sits inside the Culebra National Wildlife Refuge, where drone launches and landings are prohibited. Leave it home and let your eyes do the aerial photography from the lighthouse trail instead.
• Single-use plastics, on the reserves. Icacos is an uninhabited nature reserve and Culebrita has no trash service at all — whatever comes ashore with you leaves with you. Skip the plastic baggies and straws and there's nothing to chase down the beach in the first place.

What's already included on a guided tour

Here is where the list collapses. The reason seasoned guests show up with one small bag is that the tour carries the rest:

• Snorkel gear. Mask, snorkel and fins, sized for you at the boat. No renting, no hauling, no wondering if the mask fits a kid's face.
• Flotation for everyone. Every guest on every trip, strong swimmers included. It is why non-swimmers do fine out here.
• Guides in the water. Not watching from the deck — swimming with the group, pointing out the turtle you'd have missed.
• Food and drinks. Meals and drinks are part of the trip, which deletes the cooler, the snacks and the drinks run from your list.

That's true across our trips: the Icacos afternoon snorkeling trip — $109 all-inclusive is the easy half-day version, the Culebra day trip adds the ferry crossing and a full day on the refuge island (that's the one where closed water shoes earn their spot in the bag), and the Vieques snorkeling excursion is the one our turtle footage comes from. Book any of them and your packing list is the keybox at the top of this page, nothing more.

Reef-safe sunscreen: what the rules say, and what we ask

This is the one item on the list with a legal dimension, so let's be precise about what we know. Puerto Rico's legislature has moved to restrict sunscreens containing oxybenzone and octinoxate — the bill was written to prohibit sale and use of formulas with those two chemicals while explicitly allowing mineral formulas made with zinc oxide or titanium dioxide (One Green Planet's coverage of the bill is a readable summary). We won't pretend to track every amendment from a boat deck, and enforcement on a given beach is not something we can promise you either way.

Here's why it doesn't matter to your packing: our ask is the same regardless of what the law says this month. The places these trips go — the Icacos reserve, the refuge waters around Culebra and Culebrita, the turtle seagrass off Vieques — are exactly the environments those chemicals were flagged for harming. So bring mineral sunscreen: zinc oxide or titanium dioxide as the active ingredients, listed right on the back of the tube. “Reef friendly” on the front of the bottle is marketing; the ingredients list is the truth. Apply it before you board so it has time to set, and remember a rash guard covers most of what sunscreen does without washing off into the water at all.

What should you wear snorkeling?

Simplest answer on the page: a swimsuit you can actually swim in, worn under light clothes, with sandals. That's it. The water here runs warm year-round — wetsuits are not a thing on these trips — and anything beyond a swimsuit is sun management, not temperature management. A rash guard on top if you burn (most people should), a hat and sunglasses with straps for the boat ride, and flip-flops you can kick off on deck, because fins go over bare feet and the boat is a barefoot place. Skip anything you'd describe as an outfit: cover-ups with dangling ties, jewelry, anything white you care about. If it would annoy you wet, it will annoy you here. For what the water itself is like through the year — and whether a given month changes any of this — see our guide to the best time to snorkel in Puerto Rico; and if you're sorting out nerves rather than wardrobe, start with our honest safety guide.

Pack light, wear the swimsuit, trust the boat to carry the rest. We'll see you at the dock — and we'll have the gear waiting.