Starting Drysuit Class

[Mike126]

Sorry I touched a nerve!


As for all that addressed my questions, thanks! I'll have to read the chapter again but I'm almost sure they recommend use the DS over your wing.

I'll see if the shop would be willing to change the neck seal.


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[tkdgodess]

Eh, its not a big deal either suit or wing works, you are going to need the same amount of air regardless, might as well have it in the suit and be warmer. Just pick one way and stick to it (suit for all uw buoyancy, or bcd for bouyancy/suit for no squeeze) until you feel more confident to play around.

I use drysuit when single tank diving diving, and both suit and wing for steel doubles. On really cold deco days i dump air from my wing and add to my suit.


I teach suit for bouyancy underwater. Primarily because it is warmer, and warmer divers are happy divers. I am not opposed to either way.

 

[JohnN]

Eh, its not a big deal either suit or wing works, you are going to need the same amount of air regardless, might as well have it in the suit and be warmer. Just pick one way and stick to it (suit for all uw buoyancy, or bcd for bouyancy/suit for no squeeze) until you feel more confident to play around.

I use drysuit when single tank diving diving, and both suit and wing for steel doubles. On really cold deco days i dump air from my wing and add to my suit.


I teach suit for bouyancy underwater. Primarily because it is warmer, and warmer divers are happy divers. I am not opposed to either way.

I dive a big single (HP120) that is rougly 10 lbs of swing from full to 500 psi, and a whole lot of air for a suit. No thanks, suit for warmth, wing for buoyancy.

 

[FinnMom]

Peter Guy above (#18) is very right: quick-change seals on all the rental suits for a class would be a brilliant idea and a great sales idea.

It's not just Whites that have quick-change seals. For about $130 you can buy the SiTech setup to replace a suits original seals, and Waterproof drysuits also offers a kit to replace a suits original seals with their quick-change silicon seals, was 53£ at Simply Scuba UK, so maybe about $100 delivered to USA.

I usually wear the thickest, fluffiest undersuit available and have never really noticed a problem with air in the suit or this so-called bubble. I think the undersuit and the cold have always required so much air in the suit that I never knew life could have been easier. By the time I dove the drysuit in sub-tropics I had used it enough that even with almost no undersuit I still didn't notice a "bubble".

Using my wing for buoyancy creates a wonderously stable, horizontal lift that is really nice, and I tend to use it once I'm maybe 12m or deeper. Once I am getting shallow or in less than 5m the whole time the suit is easier because it vents if I just roll and shrug my shoulders a bit, no hand movement required. For me it is much easier if my hands are both occupied, or if my concentration is required elsewhere. Shrugging is easier and faster than finding and using the inflation hose.

 

[DeepSeaExplorer]

Peter Guy above (#18) is very right: quick-change seals on all the rental suits for a class would be a brilliant idea and a great sales idea.

It's not just Whites that have quick-change seals. For about $130 you can buy the SiTech setup to replace a suits original seals, and Waterproof drysuits also offers a kit to replace a suits original seals with their quick-change silicon seals, was 53£ at Simply Scuba UK, so maybe about $100 delivered to USA.

I usually wear the thickest, fluffiest undersuit available and have never really noticed a problem with air in the suit or this so-called bubble. I think the undersuit and the cold have always required so much air in the suit that I never knew life could have been easier. By the time I dove the drysuit in sub-tropics I had used it enough that even with almost no undersuit I still didn't notice a "bubble".

Using my wing for buoyancy creates a wonderously stable, horizontal lift that is really nice, and I tend to use it once I'm maybe 12m or deeper. Once I am getting shallow or in less than 5m the whole time the suit is easier because it vents if I just roll and shrug my shoulders a bit, no hand movement required. For me it is much easier if my hands are both occupied, or if my concentration is required elsewhere. Shrugging is easier and faster than finding and using the inflation hose.

It depends on where you're diving. On open water dives, it's relatively easy to stay horizontal to mange the bubble. After a while it becomes second nature and you might not even notice that you're doing it.

Imagine you're in a cave and you have yourself trimmed out perfectly, with just the right amount of air in your suit. Then, cave takes a sharp drop and you have to go head down to follow the cave. There's no room to stay horizontal as you descend. Now, every last little bit of air you had in your suit is at your feet. You have your weighting squared away so it's controllable, but it's just not comfortable being so light footed, especially when you're used to being perfectly trimmed. You fix it and continue the dive. So on the next dive, what do you do? You're probably going to put less air in your suit and more in the wing.

 

[TSandM]

The recommendation for the use of the dry suit for buoyancy is based on two things: One is that the people who wrote the book felt that it was excessive task-loading to expect a newer diver to manage two separate air spaces while trying to maintain buoyancy, and the other that a diver who is truly properly weighted, with a normal sized tank, will require about as much gas as they need for buoyancy, just to loft their undergarment fully. (Depending, of course, on the water temperature and the amount of undergarment!)

I found, as I have seen student also find, that initially, and especially before I got my weighting fine-tuned, I just didn't anticipate buoyancy changes fast enough to control the suit well. I couldn't "feel" the suit beginning to expand before it got me in trouble. Keeping the suit pretty empty and the wing full certainly didn't give me the maximum warmth benefit of diving dry, but it stopped the uncontrolled ascents, so it seemed like the better bargain. A couple of years later, I worked with Andrew Georgitsis, who wanted me to keep all the gas in the suit, and at that point, I found I could now do so, and for single tank diving now, that's what I do (unless I'm diving 130s, which require too much suit gas to be comfortable).

You CAN temporize an ill-fitting neck seal with outside compression to a degree, although it depends on how bad the seal fit actually is. BioSeals, as mentioned, will take up some slack (but degrade the seal, and I doubt the shop would be happy with you using one. They also aren't cheap.) I have used bungie, believe it or not, to do the same thing, and it did work to reduce the leak. But I would strongly recommend against doing any open water diving with a bad seal fit, because that's what they talked me into doing during my first day of OW dives, and I ended up with pretty significant hypothermia from being soaked in 50 degree water. However, being wet in the pool is just annoying, and I can understand why the shop owner doesn't want his nice suit taken into the chlorine. So it might not be unreasonable to play along with them and dive the shop suit in the pool, making sure you have a dry set of clothes to change into afterwards, and accept the loan of the better-fitting suit for the open water dives.