DUI says 40°f water is Ice Diving

[NaCl H2O]

I would have thought it would be more Florida-centric!

The fish in my area stay unfrozen year round

 

[lexvil]

You’ll may want to look up the properties of water in relation to btu’s and pressure.

for under 40° f is NFW diving.

 

[John C. Ratliff]

If the water gets up toward 70 degrees F, I usually dive a shorty. Diving in water that’s in the 40s to 50s degrees F is fairly normal here in Oregcon. When it’s below 60 degrees, I put on my gloves, and below 50 degrees F I have that shorty under the wetsuit. I currently don’t have a dry suit, but did dive an Aquala dry suit in the 1970s and 1980s in really cold water (Clear Lake in the Oregon Cascades, the headwaters of the McKenzie River, which is 37 degrees year-round).

Now, concerning the term, “ice dive,” that‘s where there’s an overhead environment of ice above the diver, and it becomes technical diving. Calling diving in cool to cold water an “ice dive” is not appropriate, as on an actual ice dive the divers have ventured into technical diving, with necessary strategies to mitigate the overhead hazard.

Here is a cold water dive in which two of us are diving dry suits, and I’m still in my wetsuit. The water temperature was in the 50s F.


SeaRat