Haven’t blogged in a little while… waiting for something interesting to happen. Something finally happened… I got a new dry-suit for scuba diving. I ended up getting a Bare CD-4 Pro Dry… purchased from All Wet Watersport inWaterloo, Ontario.
Got a chance to give the new suit a try yesterday… in a pool. When switching from ‘wet’ to ‘dry’ there are a few things a diver must be aware of; number one… dress appropriately. When diving ‘dry’ you generally wear special thermal underwear since a dry-suit doesn’t have the built in thermal protection of a neoprene suit, however… if the water is even slightly warm, let’s say over 65F the underwear are too warm. In the pool I chose to wear a T-Shirt and ‘sleep’ pants… even that was too warm.
Point number two… this is the big one! Normally a buoyancy compensating vest (BC) is used… with a dry-suit you have an extra hose attached to the suit itself, adding a little more complication. The suit becomes your buoyancy compensator when under water… a little confusing at first but one quickly adapts. Now… imagine what happens if a diver were to have his head lower than his feet while under water… all that air in, in your suit, goes right to your feet and you end up floating upside-down. After some struggling, the instructor came over and taught me the “tuck-and-roll” technique… it worked! I tried it several more times until I felt comfortable… this technique MUST be mastered.
The best part of the day was getting out of the water… peeling off my dry-suit and discovering I was dry! This may not seem a big deal at a pool but when diving on a cold day (or night) believe me this is huge!
More on the suit when I go for an actual deep-cold dive up North in a couple weeks…
the dan blog 