Well this morning I rented a car and headed to a local dive shop in Kentucky, it’s just the other side of the river you know. The reason I went there is because I am going to be taking a dry suit class on Saturday and I needed to go in to try the suit on and get in the pool and make sure it fit.
For those of you who don’t know what a dry suit is I guess I had better start with a wet suit which is probably more widely known. A wet suit is generally made of neoprene rubber and what it does is allow a small portion of water in between the suit and your skin. Your body heat quickly warms up this small portion of water and then the Neoprene insulates that little bit of water from the larger body that you are diving or swimming in. This is great for most diving and can even be used in colder water but the colder the water, even with this insulation, you still get cold. Water has a greater heat capacity than air does so water absorbs the heat from your body 25 times faster than air. So unless you are diving in 93 degree water or warmer you still lose body heat to the point that eventually you will get cold and need to get out of the water.
I have dove in a two piece 7mm thick wetsuit while I was in Vancouver a couple of years ago. The two pieces means that on my chest there is actually 14mm of insulating neoprene rubber keeping me warm. My friend was diving in a dry suit. Well the water temperature for those two dives was a nipple freezing 47F or 8C. After the first dive I was literally blue and my friend was shocked that I was going back into the water. The reason my friend was shocked was because he was diving in a dry suit and was warm and toasty.
What a dry suit does differently than a wet suit, as the name implies, is that it keeps you dry. It is usually a shell of some sort that looks like a giant one piece jump suit with feet that has a big zipper and seals at the neck and wrists. It is the seals at the neck and wrists and the big waterproof zipper that keeps all of th water out and keeps you dry. As I said earlier air transmits heat slower than water so by insulating yourself with air you can stay warm longer, plus you can wear thermal underwear which allows you to stay down even longer.
So I went to this dive shop in order to try and see if one of the rental suits would fit me and to get in one before diving in a Quary for the first time. The first forray into the drysuit was interesting. Sticking your hands through the wrist seals is difficult and pulls a lot of your arm hair. The neck seal is just wierd because there is something tight around your neck. Add all of this to the fact that you are standing in a warm humid room and I think I was getting more wet inside of the suit than if I was wearing a wetsuit and in the water. Once I did get into the water I was much more comfortable. On my first submersion I felt a little bit of a leak down the front of my chest where water was getting in. I came up, we readjusted things and I went back down and again more water down the chest. By now the store owner had stopped in and asked me to hold on for a second while he went and got something.
Basically what he went and got was a tube of neoprene that I was to put over my head and onto my kneck to help the suit seal there. Well the first time on it came off almost immediately because I thought it was too tight and was going asphixiate. After calming down for a second the owner put the tube on, and his neck was definitely larger than mine, and he said it was okay. So I took a deep breath and calmly put it back on and let him adjust everything for me and in the end it wasn’t so bad once it was adjusted. Normally you don’t need this kind of thing but because it is a rental suit they have to adjust the seals to fit a larger group of people than if I was to own the suit myself. I went down again and this time it was just fine.
So now I have a scuba tank, a dry suit and thermal underwear in my rental car just waiting to go diving on this coming Saturday without getting the majority of my body wet. My head, face and hands will still get wet but that is manageable. I’ll let you all know how it goes on Saturday.
I hope you all were able to follow this…
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