DRYSUITS FOR DUMMIES
If you can handle a BC, you can handle a drysuit, so put
cold fears
aside and warm
up to the idea of diving dry.* by John Francis
In most divers
who didn’t cut
their diving teeth wearing one, drysuits can inspire
a cold, anxious sweat. It would be great to dive year-round
in warm, dry comfort, but cautionary tales of divers
getting air trapped in their feet and rising uncontrollably
to the surface spring to mind. I mean, how the heck do
you even put the thing on? Surely NASA training, or at
least an advanced degree, must be required.
Well, no. In principle, a drysuit is no more complex
or dangerous than your BC, and you’ve mastered that, haven’t you? And when you think of
the diving options you’ve been missing, a drysuit begins to look pretty
comfy indeed.
YOUR FIRST DRYSUIT DIVE
Diving dry requires a few new skills, but mostly it’s a matter
of refocusing those you already have, like weighting and buoyancy
control. Here’s
what’s going to be most different:
Suit squeeze
As you descend, your body’s internal pressure equalizes with outside
water pressure, but the air and the clothing between the suit and your skin
gets compressed. You feel the pressure against your skin everywhere. Folds
and ridges in the suit and the undies can press on you uncomfortably, but it’s
more weird than painful. For example, if you are vertical in the water, the
higher pressure on your legs is quite noticeable. In any case, it’s easy
to relieve the sensation: just add air to your suit or change your body position
in the water.
Your drysuit is your BC
Current doctrine holds that you should inflate your BC only on the
surface. You’ll control your buoyancy under water by put-ting
air in your suit, not in your BC. In fact, your BC reverts to what
it was at the beginning of scuba diving: a tank mount and emergency
life vest.
The thinking here is that you’ll have to put air into your
suit anyway, and managing two air bladders with separate sets of
valves may be confusing for new drysuit divers. So use your drysuit
for both purposes. Buoyancy control itself is the same process of
adding air as you descend, venting it as you ascend and as you use
up the air in your tank. Only the valves, and how you operate them,
are different.
More advanced drysuit divers or those diving
steel or double tanks tend to prefer adding just enough air to their
drysuit to offset suit squeeze and use their BC to achieve neutral
buoyancy.
*Reprinted in part from Rodale's Scuba Diving Magazine, April 2002
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