Dry Suit Advice Please!

[Nudi-Lover]

Hi,

I've been a tropical-type water diver for a while and worked as a DM for the last year or so.

I've come back to Europe for a while and want to (NEED TO!) dive. I've always wanted to get into cold water diving and this is my chance to gain the experience and further my skills - I know cold water diving will make me a better diver technically and just generally more aware in such different - and more taxing - conditions...

I would really appreciate some advice and recommendations on dry suits. I'll be diving mostly in fresh water lakes. I'm quite little (5'2" and a bit) and I get cold very easily. I like my equipment light (Mikron reg and Zuma BCD) but know I have to get new gear - cold reg and a new wing n harness with more capacity than small Zuma. I'm currently thinking compressed neoprene will be good for me coz of insulation and buoyancy...but would love some feedback from experienced dry suit divers...reading lots of stuff on internet but head starting to explode! Please help!

 

[Teller]

I love my DUI TLS350. Its light, flexible and dries very quickly.

 

[Tejasmtb]

I don't think you can go wrong with a suit from DUI, White's Diving, or WaterProof. All of these companies stand out as the best in the industry IMHO and offer suits from $1500 to $3000+ new. Do a little reading on the offerings from each of these manufacturers on here and see where you can snag a good deal and I am sure you will be happy. I personally plan to dive a drysuit for 8-10 years or until I have "outgrown" it and I hope it's the former and not the latter. I personally picked up a White's Diving Kodiak recently.

If you buy an entry level drysuit and if you dive it a lot you will probably be looking to replace or upgrade it within three years. Spending more money up front here I think is a wise option, again this is just one man's opinion and I have just recently started scratching the surface of diving dry so by all means take this advice with a grain of salt. Again, if you can find something in your size lightly used or on closeout I wouldn't hesitate to save that money and jump on it.

Best of luck in your search!

Tejas

 

[ajduplessis]

Any suit that does not leak and fit well is a good suit. You need to decide what you like (neo or trilam). Once you are dry thermal protection is the next vital component. Do some reseach and test dive a couple option from your LDS. Things will become a lot clearer then.

 

[sambolino44]

I'm happy with my High Tide neoprene suit, but there are so many more options available in just the past couple of years. The White's fusion is unlike any other, and I know a smallish diver who loves hers. I've been very curious about the new Bare SB system, but haven't seen any objective reviews yet. Getting to try before you buy is great, but sometimes hard to find. DUI does "Demo Days" here in the US, but I don't know about Europe. I have another friend who's happy with his Santi (Poland) suit.

A neoprene (crushed, compressed, or regular) suit will be heavy and more bulky,but will fit snugly with less wrinkles, and you'll need less insulation in the undergarment (I use fleece). A membrane suit (trilam) will be lighter, but have more wrinkles, and need more insulation in the undergarment (like a Weezle, for instance). The Fusion is a membrane suit, but with an outer stretch layer that makes it more streamlined.

My wife is small, and she gets cold; we're still looking for an answer for her to stay warm. Dry gloves help a lot, but you need good insulation there, too. You may need larger fins, so make sure you have your socks, undergarment, and suit figured out before you get your fins, or you may have to start all over again.

Good luck!

 

[Thalassamania]

Here is my usual answer to the what drysuit is best question:

First, let me warn you, there are few issues in diving that have more opinions backed by less data that dry suit selection. I doubt if there are more than a few divers on the board here who have, long term, dove more than one or at most two different designs of suit. Dry suits are very expensive items and folks get real ego involved when they make multi thousand dollar decisions, if you know what I mean. Most folks dive what their instructor or LDS tells them to, and unfortunately most Instructors have limited dry suit experience and most LDS only have one or two brands of suit to sell you and don’t really understand the advantages and drawbacks of even those suits. Let me give you an example, drawn from the question of wetsuit selection, but it addresses this problem and should help you to understand what you’re up against:

I issue a very detailed equipment list before each class that students who are accepted into the class need to purchase and show up with at the first meeting.

The suits we were using at the time were, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, 5mm, skin two side, Rubatex GN-231N, attached hood, farmer johns, no zippers. I send my list to all the LDSs in the area and freely distribute whatever they send back to the students (this is a big deal to the shops, in the dead of winter, twenty full sets of gear with no selling or inventory required: take the order, take the money, and deliver in two weeks).

One student did not go to an LDS, but rather to a shop near her home, about a hundred miles away. I got a call from the Instructor in the shop informing me, in a fairly emphatic tone, that, “No diver could possibly wear this suit. They could not put it on without a zipper.” Now, please understand that I’ve been diving this suit design since the mid sixties, and the only people who need an inverted half zipper in the jacket are incredibly curvaceous women of petite statue. This woman was just shy of six foot, very athletic and quite thin.

Having nothing better to do (and considering that the woman in question was one of the brighter marine geologist grad students), I drove up to the shop later in the day. I brought my suit with me. I showed the Instructor how easy it was to put on and take off, etc. We solved the problem, but the bottom line was that this Instructor, well meaning as she was, had not yet worn out her first suit and was repeating what her Instructor’s had told her. It wasn’t a marketing issue, the LDS could and did supply the gear (and nicely matched the prices of the LDSs that had sent fliers).

The bottom line is that for dive gear, real information is hard to come by. Most of the opinions that you see on the net are biased either by being the only piece of that class of gear that a new diver has ever used or being a loaner that the expert tried out on one or two dives.

The thing that you need to do is find an expert who is doing the kind of diving that you plan on doing and ask him or her about the gear. That may well not be an Instructor. Don’t be afraid to bore on in, why … why … why. If you do not get answers that you understand, find another expert. Make sure that the advice makes sense in terms that you understand. When it does, buy the gear and never look back.

With all that said, I really can’t advise you until you define the diving you want to use your new suit for, but here are some thoughts:

Crushed, laminate and vulcanized suits have no inherent insulative properties so they are totally depended upon underwear and gas trapped in the suit for insulation. As you descend you add gas to the suit and that keeps both buoyancy and thermal characterizes constant.

Uncrushed neoprene (and please understand that there is a HUGE difference between the neoprene many suit manufacturers use and quality Rubatex in terms of compression) will crush with depth, but not 1/2 at 33 foot, 1/4 at 99 ft, etc. As is does, you must introduce gas into the suit to maintain neutral buoyancy, just as with a membrane suit, and that keeps the insulation about the same.

Which is best? I don't really know. I've had Unisuits, Jetsuits, Vikings, DUIs, and a Polaris (Rubatex suit from a small Santa Cruz custom house) over the years. I currently have the Polaris which I prefer for shore diving, a Viking for polluted water (nothing else can really be disinfected) and a DUI that is a joy for boat diving. I use an old set of Unisuit woolies under the Polaris and a ripstop/holowfill/synthetic pile (the blue and gray stuff) set of Viking underwear under the Viking and DUI.

For protection from the rocks the Polaris is the best, for minimum drag while swimming the Viking wins hands down, for ease of in and out, the DUI gets the nod. For ease of repair, it's the Viking. There is one thing that I have in common on all three suits: SiTec wrist rings (which I use with wrist seals) and SiTec neckseal/dogcollar/dryhood system. I can easily introduce air into the glove by raising my hand and wiggling my fingers (this lets some air past the latex wrist seal) and I can get air out by careful “burping.” The neckseal system allows me to throw away a torn neckseal and have a new one in place in seconds, and the dry hood adds a lot of warmth.

I've yet to find the single use that the tilam excels at, it is light, packing away small for travel, and dries quickly, perhaps it’s advantage is being second best at everything … no small feat.

No question, if durability is the only issue, a Viking HD (or equivalent) is the suit of choice. A viking style suit (viking, gates, avon, etc.) will take the most of that sort of abuse since the material does not wet (it is also the only style suit that is as "good as new" after a field repair.[/QUOTE]

 

[FinnMom]

I love my Ursuit, seems like a lot better quality than DiveRite & much cheaper than a DUI.
I paid a little more to buy from a scuba shop that orders the suits, selecting exactly the size of neck seal, wrist seals & boots that fit me best, plus any other alterations to the standard suit. Hand made in Europe, not China.