But Divers Alert Network Asia-Pacific founder John Lippmann, who has been researching the industry for 40 years, said there were also lessons the industry could take away from the death. The inquest report highlighted two of the key difficulties tour operators faced when dealing with casual tourists, as opposed to regular divers, wanting to snorkel on the reef, one of which Mr Lippmann was hoping to reduce. The first challenge was the manner in which snorkel deaths - 49 in Queensland from 2000-2011 - tended to come. Swimmers were rarely seen “violently struggling on the surface before succumbing and sinking”, the coroner Kevin Priestly noted. The second was that some people, particularly older men, could be reluctant to acknowledge or discuss concerns before getting in the water, although there was no indication that was the case with Mr Finlayson.

Mr Lippman, who has been in the field for some 40 years, has been analysing all snorkel deaths across the country between 2001 and 2013 for an in-progress PhD. There were 49 deaths in recreational snorkelling workplaces in Queensland from 2000-2011. Credit:Jay Cronan He found heart conditions were “highly probable contributors” in a third of the 175 deaths and figured as much as 75 per cent of those knew about the problem before getting in the water. “One of the issues is people, like possibly Mr Finlayson, have snorkelling on the barrier reef on their bucket list,” he said. “They want to do it. They’re highly motivated to do it and so you’ll get a percentage of people that may have diagnosed medical conditions who will withhold medical information … because they don’t want it to stop them.

“Now all you can do is when you brief them just let them know the importance of coming forward with that information because of risk to themselves.” He has applied to Workplace Health and Safety Queensland for funding to strap heart monitors to snorkelers on the reef, with the aim of better understanding who is susceptible to heart problems when snorkelling. He hoped the research, if approved, could be used to design pre-dive screening processes better able to help identify at-risk snorkellers before they got in the water. “We can’t predict how much it will reduce it,” he said. “(But) we think it’s something that needs to be done.”

Fellow long-term dive death researcher Douglas Walker identified a “silent snorkel syndrome” death in 1973, although it had its detractors, who argued it could simply describe drawings that weren’t spotted. Dr Walker used the term to describe “a sudden loss of consciousness from a cardiovascular cause would produce no disturbance apparent as drowning occurred” but there were those who said it could apply outside of heart conditions as well. The GP submitted the “apparently fit” Mr Finlayson’s death appeared to be just such a case, with an enlarged heart and calcification and narrowing of the arteries not discovered until just after death. Such events were unpredictable, unpreventable and silent, he noted, and a “witness would notice only a quietness and absence of further movement of the limbs”, he told the inquest. Speaking to Fairfax Media, he said the information went to show just how difficult being a lookout could be, despite its common categorisation as “just an odd job that you do while you’re up on deck”.