- Hi, everybody and welcome to Scuba Diver Magazine,
your very favorite place for scuba diving news,
advice and entertainment.
In today's video, I'm gonna talk about
why more divers should really be diving in dry suits.
Because let's face it,
this warm weather isn't gonna last forever.
So, when I first started out scuba diving in dry suits,
in my eyes, dry suits were for serious cold water diving.
As if that's the only time that you can ever use them,
but dry suits are an amazing tool for scuba divers.
A few years back, I took a whole group of students
to the Red Sea in the warmer sort of months of the year
and beforehand they asked me
what kind of wetsuit they should bring along,
I just told them a three mil shorty should be plenty,
but you should have seen their faces
when they were kitting up
and the divers on the boat next to us
were all putting on their dry suits.
You can dive your dry suit all year round
in all waters and I do.
I much prefer my dry suit.
I, like most scuba divers, I have a five mil wetsuit
but I don't think I've touched it for at least 10 years.
It's a lovely wetsuit, it's a waterproof Lynx five mil,
which kind of shows its age.
But I can dive my dry suit anywhere
that I normally wear my five mil
and for warm water diving abroad as well,
but normally I'll just sort of wear my shorty
if I'm not doing anything deep.
So dry suits shouldn't be this unattainable
dark magic kind of a suit that are only for certain divers
who have reached a certain level.
They're just a tool to keep you warm under water.
And they use air to keep you warm instead of water.
Air is a much better insulator the water.
In the winter time, your thick wooly jumper
is the warmest thing to put on
because it traps lots of air against your body,
only we don't soak our jumpers
in cold water before heading out to stay warm,
you just rely on that air to keep you warm.
Your body radiates heat outwards
and it gets trapped in that air inside your jumper,
and the same happens for your dry suit
because underneath you wear an under suit
which is just a fancy wooly jumper.
Now, before you close this video,
just buy a dry suit online and jump into the open ocean,
you do need some training before you can dive a dry suit
but they are definitely worth your time.
And they are something that you can travel with
to stay warm.
So let's take a moment to appreciate the modern dry suit
and look at why you should dive a dry suit.
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Now, most people's first introduction to a dry suit
is in the Bond movie "Goldfinger",
you know the one where Bond kind of scuba dives
in the middle of the night,
sneaking past guards, only just a rip off his dry suit
to reveal a perfect white tuxedo.
A stark difference to the creature from the Black Lagoon
that you feel like crawling out of a wetsuit,
all kind of soggy and wet.
While you don't tend to wear expensive tuxedos
under your dry suit, at least I don't,
nor attend any fancy soirees soon after a dive,
you do get out of the water, unzip your dry suit,
and you're dry underneath.
You can head inside for some food
or you can jump straight in the car and head home.
The only bits of you that actually get wet
are your head and your hands.
So after a dive, you are so much more comfortable.
In a wetsuit, you kind of have to peel your suit off
and your cold wet body is now exposed
to the cold wind blow drying you.
And the water itself is never fresh, distilled clean water,
so you now need to go take a shower to be properly clean.
Only if you're on a liveaboard or something
you can't actually go inside whilst you're still wet.
And if you're at an inline dive site,
you can't go inside anywhere neither,
but with a dry suit, you can just go straight in
in your under suit because you're perfectly dry
and you're not gonna stain the floor
or create any wet patches.
There's a lot to be said about exiting after a long dive
and you are bone dry.
The base layers and under suits that we wear,
they're built to specifically wick moisture away
from your skin so that your skin stays dry and clean.
So you can just get on with things after a dive.
Whilst wetsuit divers are toweling themselves dry
and deciding whether it's worth getting changed
into some dry clothes only to change back out of them again
before the next dive.
As a dry suit diver, you can just get on with things
and do something productive.
Also for the second and even the third dives of the day,
I can promise you that it is much nicer
to climb into a dry suit than it is to climb
into a wet wetsuit.
Wetsuits never dry that quickly,
so you have to climb into a wet,
cold, clingy skintight suit,
that takes a few moments to actually warm up.
It's much more pleasant in a dry suit.
Oh, and the other thing that I don't miss about wetsuits
is that first cold trickle of water
that runs down your back when you first hit the water.
You don't get that in a dry suit,
unless something very wrong has gone wrong.
But the main selling point for dry suits
is obviously in their warmth.
The obvious main benefit of dry suits
that I've pretty much already spoken about
is the warmth factor.
A friend of mine will only ever dive in a wetsuit
so that he can experience what his students are feeling.
But if they see their instructor wearing a wetsuit
then they'll think that this is what cold water diving
just feels like and they may never do it again,
which is bad for the sport.
Whereas if you're diving in a dry suit
you should never get cold.
If you do get cold on a dive
then you're just not wearing enough exposure protection.
Wetsuits also have the unfortunate feature
that they compress at depth.
So the deeper down you go where it's actually the coldest,
your wetsuit is actually the thinnest.
So you have less and less insulation
the deeper down you go.
In a dry suit, you can just top up your insulation
as you need it so that you can maintain a constant warmth.
Keeping your body warmth is more important
than just being comfortable on a dive.
Your body temperature is essential
to knowing your rate of decompression too.
Chemical reactions tend to go much faster
the warmer they are.
So when you're nice and warm,
your body is absorbing gases at a sensible rate.
And it expels the dissolved gases at a sensible rate too.
When your body is cold, those rates slow down,
so you're not getting rid of those dissolved gases.
Only your dive computer doesn't really know that,
very few dive computers actually take
your body temperature or even the water temperature
into account when they're working out your safety stops.
So if you're cold at the end of a dive,
you may actually have a bit more gas
still absorbed in your tissues
than your dive computer thinks.
And you're cold, so your base instinct is just to get out
as soon as possible, but actually your best option
is really to be a bit more conservative
and stay under some pressure
to actually give as much of that gas
time to leave your system properly.
The constant compression over time
can actually become permanent, so your five mil wetsuits,
it probably was five mil thick when you first bought it,
but after a few years of constant compression,
it's probably been squished down to a four mil
or even a three mil.
A lot of those teeny tiny bubbles
that make up neoprene that are supposed to keep you warm,
they've probably closed now.
You don't have that problem with a dry suit.
Even a neoprene dry suit because neoprene dry suits
are made from high density neoprene,
that's already pre-squished,
so you can't squish them anymore.
Dry suits also give you the option to fit
a dry glove system to them
so that your hands can stay dry as well.
The trick with cold water diving
and keeping your hands warm
is always a trade off with neoprene gloves.
The colder the water or the longer the dive
then the thicker the gloves you'll need.
Once you get to five mil gloves,
which are pretty much the standard,
you actually have a whole centimeter of neoprene
between two fingertips.
That's three quarters of an inch of squidgy foam neoprene.
So delicate tasks are just out of the question.
For much colder water, you then get seven mil gloves
and they're over half an inch across.
So your hands are nice and warm,
but you can't feel what you're doing,
and you can barely put the gloves on themselves
because by the time that you put the first glove on
you have no chance of putting the second glove on.
You can always go thinner
but then your hands will just go numb with the cold.
So you often trade dexterity and not being able to feel
what you're doing against going numb
and not being able to feel what you're doing.
Now, my dry gloves are maybe three millimeters thick
but they're as warm as seven mil gloves.
And then you can even get heated gloves
to keep your fingers warm.
Just be careful with heated under suits
and make sure that you understand
how they can affect your decompression too.
But they do make a dexterity much easier using dry gloves.
So the main benefits of dry suits are in their comfort
and their warmth in and out of the water.
But they also have another benefit
that most people don't think about.
One benefit of dry suits comes from how they work
because they use a layer of gas to insulate you.
That airspace changes volume as you ascend and descend.
So to stop you from being vacuum packed into your suit
as you dive down deeper,
we add inflation valves to the dry suit,
so just like your BCD, you can top up your dry suit
in the water to relieve the squeeze
and add some more warm insulation.
But if you're adding gas then you're changing your buoyancy
so you need to be able to get rid of it,
so we use a dump valve.
Inflation valve, a dump valve, an air space
that you can sort of add and remove gas from,
this sounds a lot like a BCD.
Well, you can use your BCD to control your buoyancy
and it can be a redundant backup
if something should go wrong with your BCD.
Now on a dive before I've actually punctured a BCD bladder
and without any backups
you can't control your buoyancy properly.
Unless you're diving with a spare BCD on you,
then a dry suit can be a very functional redundant backup.
If I'm diving on my twins,
I'll actually run my BCD from one first stage
and my dry suit from another one,
so it is a completely independent backup.
If the first stage to my BCD fails,
I can still control my buoyancy effectively
with the other one and just use my dry suit
to control my buoyancy.
There's lots of different ways to control your buoyancy
in dry suit diving.
Some divers will only use their BCD
to control their buoyancy
and use their dry suit just to top it up every now and then
just to stay a bit comfortable.
Others only use their dry suit to control their buoyancy
whilst they're under the water,
and will only use their BCD once they're on the surface.
And others use a combination of the two.
But while we always dive with a second, second stage,
just in case something goes wrong,
we're rarely taught to dive with a second buoyancy device.
It's usually just, if you get in trouble, drop your weights,
but I'd rather be able to maintain a correct buoyancy
than just ditch all of my lead.
So if you're getting cold on dives
or you're just thinking about investing
in a thick seven mil wetsuit or even a semi-dry,
then maybe it's worth taking a moment just to consider
a full on dry suit.
They do require a little bit of training,
but once you're over that hurdle,
you're into the wonderful world of dry suit diving.
But what do you think about dry suits?
Do you dive them yourself?
What do you think about them?
Are you still on the fence and you can't really decide,
let's talk about dry suits in the comments below
and we can answer any questions
that you may have about them.
Don't forget to like, and subscribe
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Thank you for watching.
And of course, safe diving.
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