Diving a Dry Suit

[kathydee]

You can extend your legs a bit to move some air to the torso/ arms area while maintaining a relatively flat position in the water. Just be mindful of silt/ coral/ critters below you if you do that.

You can extend one leg down at a time to move the gas from you legs. That way most of your body stays in trim.

Congrats on your new suit !!

 

[Ramsy]

I know I have too much air in my drysuit when my lower legs feel "floaty." With the lower legs up for the frog kick position, when I get this "floaty" feeling, the drysuit feels like it is no longer "squeezing" or in contact with the undergarments on my lower legs.

For ascents and dumping air, my strategy is to get most of the air out of my drysuit early and manage buoyancy only with the wing. When I start my move for my first stop at 30, I pitch up, put my arm in a chicken wing configuration and start dumping air from my drysuit. After a few seconds of dumping, I go back to horizontal position. If I have dumped too much and am not rising (or am descending), I give my wing a shot of air.

From 30 to 20, I will again break trim and dump air from the drysuit. At this point, the drysuit will have somewhat more of a "squeeze" feel to it, but by no means is it uncomfortable. I will then level out into a horizontal trim and stop at 20.

From 20 to 10, I take a deep breath to start the move. By this time, enough air is out of my suit to allow me to hit my 10 foot stop by simply dumping whatever air is in my wing.

 

[Rainer]

For ascents and dumping air, my strategy is to get most of the air out of my drysuit early and manage buoyancy only with the wing. When I start my move for my first stop at 30, I pitch up, put my arm in a chicken wing configuration and start dumping air from my drysuit. After a few seconds of dumping, I go back to horizontal position. If I have dumped too much and am not rising (or am descending), I give my wing a shot of air.

When I first started diving dry, that's how I dived as well (minimal gas in the suit, trying to manage the ascent on the wing). Now I do just the opposite. For singles, I'll basically just use the suit. With doubles, I'll put the extra gas weight into the wing. On ascent, though, I'm moving as much gas from the wing into the suit. Makes ascending easier (dumping the suit is less involved than dumping the wing; a slight arm raise and gas trickles out; worst case, a slight roll) and more importantly, it means I maximize warmth on the part of the dive where I'm doing the least amount of work.

 

[rjack321]

When I first started diving dry, that's how I dived as well (minimal gas in the suit, trying to manage the ascent on the wing). Now I do just the opposite. For singles, I'll basically just use the suit. With doubles, I'll put the extra gas weight into the wing. On ascent, though, I'm moving as much gas from the wing into the suit. Makes ascending easier (dumping the suit is less involved than dumping the wing; a slight arm raise and gas trickles out; worst case, a slight roll) and more importantly, it means I maximize warmth on the part of the dive where I'm doing the least amount of work.

What Rainer said. In singles skip the wing and just roll the arm. In doubles, once they are somewhat depleted, migrate gas from wing to suit (on the bottom where its easiest or midway on ascent) to stay warmer.

The idea behind decent trim in mid-water is to be able to rotate and move (fore and back) in the same plane (depth) as your buddies. Coming out of trim (in moderation) to move your suit bubble around is normal and natural. If you look spastic, you need more practice.

 

[ligersandtions]

The beauty of a mid-water ascent is that there's no silt to stir up if you break trim too much to vent gas. Eventually, dumping gas becomes natural and there's only a minor break in trim....that said, as mentioned before, going completely vertical is a much better option than blowing stops and ending up in the chamber.

I used to dive the drysuit with just enough gas to relieve the squeeze. As I got better with the drysuit and realized that the more gas in it the warmer I was, I now pretty much max out the gas in the drysuit. It's especially bad when I'm scootering because that means I'm not expending too much energy (which makes me cold), plus I'm not kicking, so I don't give a crap about the floaty feet thing.

Plus, venting the drysuit on a scooter is a matter of a barrel roll or a loop


Seriously, though, 0 degree trim with your knees bent and feet up is not possible to maintain if you want to dump gas from the drysuit. It shouldn't require crazy contortions, but it will require some breaking of that perfect trim.

 

[BigBubbaJ]

I learned during some maskless ascents under wing failure during tech 1 critical skills that the suit WILL vent on its own if the valve is open all the way. Trusting that it is venting is the hard part.

I do hate the feeling of too much gas in the suit when the wing is full also, but I typically dump the wing once it's in the suit as the 6cf bottle is limited wheras the wing is unlimited typically if you consider oral inflation.

 

[TSandM]

I used to split the gas between the suit and wing when dive single tanks, and I found when I was doing that that the easiest way to control an ascent was to dump the wing gas first on the way up, and allow the gas in the suit to expand until it was easy to vent. Trying to get the last, desperate smidgens of gas out of the suit is a PITA and often really requires breaking trim and staying that way for some time. On the other hand, if you let the suit get a little loose while venting the wing, it's really easy to burp the suit in the last phases of the ascent.

The SiTech valves on two of my suits (the Fusion and the Mobby's) were so perfectly placed that all I had to do was raise my arm a little bit behind me, and the suit would "auto-dump" on ascent. This is easiest if the suit is as full as you can manage it.