I continue to read a LOT of bad comments about BARE drysuits

[KevinNM]

I'll admit I had a bad experience and know other people who got a DS from them at the same time who had major issues. But that was over a few months several years ago. Below is a review a commercial diver did of a different DS and he seemed quite happy with it.

Product Review: BARE XCS2 "Tech Dry" Drysuit

 

[tbzep]

or increase my visibility to the point where there is NO excuse on my side any more. I plan to talk to the local Marina and ask if I can post a sign with examples of people and dive flags. I have contacted the local Sherrif's Department, and the US Coast Guard, who has supposedly gone to the local marina and talked to them about the rules, and lack of understanding the rules, let alone common sense!

You have to use the same mentality that we motorcyclists have. Treat them all as if they are out to kill you. You have the right idea with visibility, and we see many motorcyclists using high viz jackets and vests, but very few go with solid white or yellow helmets which, according to tests, are easiest to see.

I agree with a bright colored hood helping most. Much of the drysuit will be under water or covered by a BC or wing. My Whites/Aqualung Hazmat drysuit is mostly red, but when I'm surfaced 50 yards from a boat, all the red is under water. If I were swimming on my back with some red exposed, a tall cabin cruiser might see me but not bass boat or jet ski low to the water until they are right on top of me. You need bright color above water. A few companies make BC's with red on them. OMS makes a red wing. Oxycheq makes wings in several colors including red, orange, and yellow.

 

[Chris H]

I have had great luck with Bare suits. I have a Tri-Lam HD from 2004 that is now a back up to my Made to Measure X-Mission. I have around 450 dives on the two suits.

 

[runsongas]

you can look like a floating pumpkin if you want by calling up DRIS and asking about getting a USIA suit customized in safety orange.

 

[Darnold9999]

I do not mean to be critical at all, but you might want to rethink your approach. You have almost been hit several times with a huge marker buoy. While a red drysuit and hood will make you slightly more visible the difference from a boaters perspective will be minimal. Yes you have a right to be there, but you will be dead and the boat will be unhurt.

Divers in the water in the PNW are extremely rare - outside of the popular dive sites - wrecks, training sites, and some other sites with specific features or attractions. In more than 40 years of boating I have yet to see one - except myself diving from my own boat. I have seen a few diving the more popular dive sites but even then it is a fairly rare sighting. Dive flags I see all the time. Almost always on charter boats tied to the dock, on a fishing charter or a dive charter heading to a dive site. You see them often enough without divers anywhere near them that they soon become meaningless unless the boat is hovering or anchored just off shore. Seeing one does not mean there are divers in the water, just means that this boat does dive charters. I have never ever seen a dive float from my boat - never. I know what one looks like because I am a diver and I have seen them at the training sites in town. Most people have never ever seen one and wouldn't know what it was even form 10 feet away.

So now you have the perfect storm. A diver in the water outside of a dive site is something you never see so why would it even enter my mind that someone might be swimming in the water - it never happens outside of clearly marked swimming areas? Dive flags often don't mean anything, and a small coloured object in the water is common and something to avoid but only by a few feet - after all they are everywhere and in some places you can't avoid them by anything more than a few feet. Black heads poking out of the water are always seals and they are everywhere and common as well. If I see a black head in the water the fist thing I think of is seal, not diver - and if the sun is behind you it does not matter what colour you are wearing you are black.

So you are something that even a very experienced boater is not expecting to need to avoid, you are just not on the list of things they need to consider. So when it does happen (that they encounter a diver in the water in an odd place) the average boater is not going to react properly - this is the first time it has ever happened to them.

None of this goes to how hard it is to see anything in the water at any distance in any kind of chop, particularly from a boat where you are steering it from low in the water i.e. not a flying bridge.

None of this is to excuse some idiot using your dive flag as a slalom course or the other idiot who is simply not paying attention. However there are a huge number of factors working against you as a diver in the water with regular boat traffic nearby.

Yes the boater is in the wrong, they should be a minimum distance away from your flag. However, the chance of said boater seeing the flag, knowing what it means, believing that it actually means that in this particular case is pretty low.

It's like stepping off the curb at an intersection at night in the rain. You have the right of way, but you will want to be really really careful.

 

[Diver0001]

Hello everyone,

I am new to this site. I am looking for a new drysuit, however, I have one specific requirement, and that is high visibility colors, as I am not only a WA cold water SCUBA diver, but I also swim out my crab pots on the surface (pots on my dive buoy) and drop them into the bay. But in the summer, there are a LOT of very stupid boaters who clearly have little experience and even less sense... I had many less than 100 foot near passes, including two within 20 feet of me at speed, last summer - one of whom drove between me and the shore! I have an airhorn I blow at them - of course. My current drysuit is blue and black, and I have had various comments, including "I thought you were a crab pot" and "I thought you were a seal". The real question is, why the heck are you boating so close to anything, let alone possible ropes and living beings? I do not know any crab pots or seals that blow air horns! So, I have chosen to go with a bright red upper on the front and back top, or full red suite. Hazmat suites can be very expensive, but I have come across the BARE HDC and X-Mission series (see image, below), which have an option of a red top section. However, I continue to read REALLY bad comments about BARE, their horrendous customer service, and new BARE drysuits delaminating quickly, and pockets pealing off, etc... I see far more complaints about them, than compliments! Seems like a Non-lemon for them is an exception!

I need feedback about this company and their drysuits please, thank you. Have they resolved these problems - really, or not? Or, if you have other suggestions for a reasonably priced reliable drysuit that would fit the bill, I am open to looking. I have found a few "lesser known" companies with red topped (all around) drysuits... I am not interested in just shoulders having color, or only the front, as it was when my back was turned that one of the boats came within 20 feet of me at about 25-30 mph! And yes, I have my head constantly on a swivel, except when I am pulling u the crab pots from my dive buoy! Thus the use of the airhorn!

I do know I can customize a suit, but I asked High Tide, and they said they could only put a strip of red across the back, but that is not enough for my secondary purpose. I have already ordered a fluorescent hood for this purpose too - but I am worried about the "thought you were a buoy" idiots!

By the way, yes I do very well with this crabbing technique! And, it is a great workout.

Thank you very much, Greg.

I needed to replace my old suit this year. Since 1985 I've had BARE suits. I was one of the first people in Western Canada to have a trilaminate drysuit -- a prototype -- from the Fitzgerald company (BARE). As a test diver I got the suit custom made for free provided I would give them feedback about it every year.

Every drysuit I had after that was a BARE. I've had 4 the course of 33 years and have had students in two other models in that time as well and I never had reason to complain about them. The fit was good due to having a large number of finely granulated standard sizes, the materials were good, the quality was good and the customer service was good. On the internet I raved about them.

I'm not normally "brand" oriented but I was so satisfied that I never thought I would ever have a drysuit that was not a BARE....

Until this year.

My old (BARE) suit was really in need of replacing. I have had it since 2008 and it had WELL over 1000 dives on it. I had replaced the zipper and the seals, of course, but that is normal maintenance. The reason, however that I needed to replace it is that it started leaking in the most unusual way. Along ALL of the seams the suit started letting water in. I was getting wet (not soaked but wet) during every dive. The worst ones were the seams from the elbow to the hip on both sides. Those were not only wet but getting progressively worse.

Granted, the suit was old, I had dived it to death and I do a lot of technical diving which means that I'm walking around in my suit with some heavy gear on some of the time... but to see the seams throughout an entire suit start to "delaminate" was troubling. I started wondering if one of the seams would literally rip open.... I stopped making "big" dives with that suit and dives in water temperatures under 8C and ordered a new one.

Before I ordered the new suit I asked our suit repair guru what I should avoid. I asked her this because I had been hearing grumbling about irreparable leaks in BARE suits from divers I know for some time.... Our drysuit person is someone whose entire career has been spent repairing drysuits and she is bar-none one of the best at it I've ever seen. I trust her completely. She told me without a moments hesitation, "whatever you do, don't by a BARE".

The reason she gave is that she gets a large number of BARE suits in for repairs under guarantee, and has been for a number of years, with all manner of problems. The delamination problem I had with my old suit was common, even with new suits, but other problems due to quality issues were also common and mounting in Europe at least.

So I bought a Mares suit (an XR). It fits like a glove... no... better than that.... it fits like the perfect glove. I've never had a drysuit that felt like I wearing jeans and a t-shirt but the Mares XR is like that.

... and it leaked. Shortly after I got it, it started to leak..... then it flooded. I'm not talking about a little bit of water from the shoulder valve being in the squeeze, I'm talking about flooding to the point that your toes are wet. It turns out the one I got was a lemon. The cuff seals were not attached correctly and they were coming unglued and letting buckets of water in..... Thinking, "ok, that can happen" I sent it back to Mares for repairs.

It took them... and I kid you not..... 3 months to fix it. In fact, they didn't fix it at all..... after 3 months they sent me a new suit. They could have done that in 3 days!

3 months! The #fail in that was HARD... REALLY HARD. Hard to understand, hard to accept, hard to defend.

At BARE for all of the quality issues they are having, I've never EVER heard of the manufacturer doing nothing FOR MONTHS when they should have been doing something. At Mares, apparently it's the way they do business. I was not impressed. I am still not impressed. Mares makes outstanding diving gear but this kind of thing cannot pass. I don't even know what they were thinking because they KNEW I would write about it on the internet!

A la. The Mares suit is unbelievably comfortable so after getting over the irritation of utterly abysmal customer service I think I'll have a lot of pleasure from this suit.

R..

 

[Compressor]

Diver0001: What suit did your Repair Guru recommend to get? Which one she has the least problem with?
Thanks.

 

[Diver0001]

She didn't recommend a suit to buy. She recommended to avoid BARE suits at this point in time until they solve their QA problems.

R..

 

[ReefGuy]

My team bought a couple of Bares around 8 or 9 years ago. They were taken out of service around three years ago. In contrast, we have a whites and a Viking (both vulcanized rubber) that have been in service since before we bought the bares, and still are (although one of them will be decommissioned in October).

In all fairness, though, we beat the crap out of our drysuits. I think the bares (that we had) would serve fine for normal use. I just have no recent experience with them.

I can't say enough about the DUI drysuits. We've been getting them with the zip seals, and they work very well. They are by far the most comfortable drysuit I've ever worn. We got them in Public Safety Orange, with wide strips of light-reflective strips on the arms, back and chest.