What do you think of Hydroglove drysuits?

[elmer fudd]

I've been diving wet all summer and I really prefer it to diving a drysuit, but summer's over and diving wet's going to start getting awfully cold soon.

I'm thinking of getting a Hydroglove suit and wearing it over my wetsuit. The price is definitely right and I'm thinking that worn over a wetsuit there likely won't be much of a squeeze factor either.

I've got a Mobies drysuit already and while it keeps me warm and mostly dry, it really doesn't fit me all that well and I just plain don't like all the weight I have to wear with it, the drag in the water and the restricted movement.

 

[David Wilson]

I've used a Hydroglove for several years now when I snorkel in the North Sea off the coast of the North East of England. I can't comment personally on its implications for squeeze because I do neither scuba nor freediving. The suit is ideal, though, for snorkelling as it's not as bulky as a modern drysuit, it doesn't bind arms and legs when swimming on the surface and it enables me to enter the water without fuss instead of enduring the customary wait until my bare torso can tolerate the water temperature, which is never very warm hereabouts. Sealing and venting the suit may take a little practice at first, but it's hardly rocket science.

Hydrogloves are based on the Skooba Totes drysuits, which were marketed between the late 1950s and mid 1960s. I own an original yellow Skooba Totes suit and can vouch for the close similarity between it and the Hydroglove. I also have a copy of an undated 1960s Underwater Catalogue issued by Submarine Products of Hexham, Northumberland, also in North East England, a long defunct company that imported the green version of the Skooba Totes suit. The description of the suit includes the following: "A diver can wear as many sweaters as he wishes underneath it - or best of all a SUPER TARZAN as an undersuit, like the French navy". The suggested "Super Tarzan" undersuit was a wetsuit made by Beuchat et Cie of Marseilles in France from "supple, form-fitting nylon-lined neoprene". So your idea of wearing a Hydroglove, effectively a modern replica of a Skooba Totes suit, over a wetsuit, has historical precedents.

Finally, there has been an extensive thread about Hydrogloves on another vintage forum, entitled:
Anyone heard of Hydroglove Drysuits?
One of the contributors was Bill Sewell, whose company makes Hydrogloves.

 

[JanK]

And of course the great advantage of this suit is that you can use it at a fancy dress party for being either a diver or a latex fetishist, depending on the accessories

 

[John C. Ratliff]

I used an Aquala Dry Suit over the bottoms (Farmer John) of my wet suit years ago, and it works very well. The one thing to warn you against for scuba--you do need to compensate with it or you can get a nasty suit squeeze, either body or ear. With the wet suit under, the ear squeeze is the greater hazard. With that in mind, you need to do one of two things:

1. Buy an inflator hose for the suit, for a LP inflation system.
2. Learn to blow air from your mask into the hood, which will compensate the suit (especially the hood).

The second option is more in character with the vintage way of doing things. Also, it used exhalations rather than air you could be breathing.

Venting is the other side of the equation; if you compensate, you need to vent. Do that out the cuff of the arm, or provide some sort of exhaust valve. The Cousteau Constant Volume suit had duckbills built into the hood and each ankle.

SeaRat

 

[John C. Ratliff]

And of course the great advantage of this suit is that you can use it at a fancy dress party for being either a diver or a latex fetishist, depending on the accessories

Or, you can dress in a Tux under the suit, surface near a party boat, board, doff the dry suit and fit right in (James Bond style).

SeaRat

 

[David Wilson]

JanK:

I see from one of your posts elsewhere that you use a Whites Fusion drysuit. Here's a picture from the 1950s of the company's founder, Frank White:



And here's another picture from the same era:



Do you know who the man on the right is? It's Jacques Cousteau, the co-inventor of the original scuba regulator, modelling his invention, a constant volume drysuit.

So, like you, they're on their way to a fetish party too? I suggest you grow up. This seems to be your first visit to the vintage diving forum. In this forum we discuss matters relating to pre-1975 diving gear. Some of us are old enough to have dived with equipment similar to the gear worn by Frank White and Jacques Cousteau in the 1950s and we still dive, and snorkel, with it because it recalls the years when we first learned to dive and also because we prefer the simplicity of the gear back then. One day your Whites Fusion drysuit will be ridiculed by somebody younger than you and I hope you will remember your own lame joke here when you respond. Oh, and by the way, I've read somewhere that any object or material can be turned into a fetish, and that includes neoprene.

I want to finish this response on a positive note, so I suggest that if you really want to learn about the history of scuba, you stick around here and study the posts of the resident experts. If diving history holds no interest for you, then find another forum that appreciates your humour better.

 

[JanK]

Sometimes the true intent of a post really gets lost in writing.

Let me be very clear: it was not meant to ridicule anyone, it was a visual knee jerk reacion, so to say. Note that I have said a fancy dress party (not that I don't condone fetish parties).

Since I've only started scuba diving a few years ago, I did not have contact with the vintage diving equipment, but I fully appreciate the preference for vintage equipment. I still tape my 20 year old guitar and do multitrack recordings on a 40 year old Revox A77 tape recorder, I play LPs on a Thorens TD 160 MkII turntable through a Marantz 4240 receiver (both around 30 years old), my car is old enough to vote and, unless I need a bigger boot to transport the potential future diving equipment, I intend to keep it until it falls apart. And, finally, I snorkel with a pair of 30 year old Cressi Rondine fins (but without the pink add-ons ) and if my similarly aged mask and snorkel hadn't been stolen from outside the tent a few years ago, I still would have been using them (they were better than the ones I have now).

As an aside: it was with utter fascination that I read an article about the Slovenian pioneers of diving, their first dives around 1937 with home-made equipment, complete with a camera case. One of these people was actually a professor of physics at my university.

So if I have offended anyone, I apologise.

 

[David Wilson]

Apology accepted, JanK. And an apology too on my part if you found my post harsh. My response to your post was motivated in part by a thread on a UK forum about a year ago where a rare and enlightening thread about vintage diving was interrupted by a young diver's naively innuendo-laden message. The previously excellent thread just stopped in its tracks because nobody felt like contributing afterwards. I was afraid that the same thing would happen in the current thread.

I congratulate you on your good taste in choosing Cressi Rondine fins. Thank you for the picture. During the 1960s I swam with Rondine clones made by the UK firm Typhoon. They're certainly cult fins and were designed by Luigi Ferraro, who also came up with the Cressi Pinocchio mask, which remains the oldest diving mask still in production.

Personally, I'd like to know more about those Slovenian pioneers of diving you mention, and the gear they designed. Our vintage forum has so many experts on the American history of diving. We don't have enough contributors able and willing to post information about diving history on the European side of the Atlantic. Feel free to start a new thread about early scuba and snorkelling in your own country.

 

[John C. Ratliff]

JanK:

I see from one of your posts elsewhere that you use a Whites Fusion drysuit. Here's a picture from the 1950s of the company's founder, Frank White:

View attachment 82476

And here's another picture from the same era:

View attachment 82477

Do you know who the man on the right is? It's Jacques Cousteau, the co-inventor of the original scuba regulator, modelling his invention, a constant volume drysuit.

So, like you, they're on their way to a fetish party too? I suggest you grow up. This seems to be your first visit to the vintage diving forum. In this forum we discuss matters relating to pre-1975 diving gear. Some of us are old enough to have dived with equipment similar to the gear worn by Frank White and Jacques Cousteau in the 1950s and we still dive, and snorkel, with it because it recalls the years when we first learned to dive and also because we prefer the simplicity of the gear back then. One day your Whites Fusion drysuit will be ridiculed by somebody younger than you and I hope you will remember your own lame joke here when you respond. Oh, and by the way, I've read somewhere that any object or material can be turned into a fetish, and that includes neoprene.

I want to finish this response on a positive note, so I suggest that if you really want to learn about the history of scuba, you stick around here and study the posts of the resident experts. If diving history holds no interest for you, then find another forum that appreciates your humour better.

Note the duckbill non-return valves on the Cousteau Constant Volume Suit that Jacques Cousteau is modeling. Also, the reason he integrated the mask into the suit was so that he could compensate the suit with a breath of air every so often.

Also, I just found this link to the MythBusters attempt to determine whether James Bond could have pulled off that dry suit to tux switch in Goldfinger. Here's the sequence of the movie.

Okay, I found the original movie. Here you go. Be sure to watch at least through the movie title song, "Goldfinger," as the special effects for that time were really well done.

SeaRat

 

[elmer fudd]

And of course the great advantage of this suit is that you can use it at a fancy dress party for being either a diver or a latex fetishist, depending on the accessories

I was thinking I could combine it with my gas mask and a few rolls of duct tape.

Seriously, in addition to latex fetish, there are even dive gear fetishists out there. A few months ago I was Googling "vintage diving pictures", trying to get a better idea of what gear divers of a different era actually used, and I came across a site devoted to half nude girls wearing and using bizarre and fetish themed dive gear.

Despite the fact that I love girls and old dive gear, I didn't really see the appeal. I like fish and I like ice cream too, but I've never wanted to combine the two.