Don, how long have you been out of the water? If you need a refresher, then by all means do one (and I do them, if you want to talk to me about it). But if what you really want is more of an introduction to local diving kind of thing, don't pay a DM to do it! We have lots of standing dives in the area, to which anyone is welcome. There's a Tuesday evening dive at Edmonds, Wednesday evening at Alki with the GUE Seattle folks, there's a south sound dive on Thursdays, and there are always people diving on the weekends. Consider checking out our local virtual dive club, nwdiveclub.com -- that's where all the dives I mentioned are posted, and where it's easy to post and ask for a buddy.
It's a good decision to buy a dry suit. People DO dive wet here (mostly in the summer) but not many do it for long. What to buy depends a lot on how serious you are about the sport and what your budget will tolerate. There are some good low-end suits -- the ScubaPro neoprene suit is very well priced, and works well if you fit into a stock size. It does have neoprene seals, though, which pretty much precludes using dry gloves. Similarly priced is the back entry White's Fusion (and Silent World in Bellevue had an insane sale on these a few weeks back), which is a very durable suit and forgiving of fit, if you are willing to live with a back zip. The front zip Fusions are a bit more expensive, but again a good suit at an affordable price. At the high end, you have DUI (which I have never owned, as too many of my friends spend too much time fixing theirs) and Santi, which is what I have and what I would highly recommend if you are looking at top of the line stuff. I don't know who is dealing Santi locally now. I got my suit through Ocean Edge Outfitters.
As far as BCs go, please do not buy on until you have had a chance to try a backplate. One of the central concepts of Puget Sound diving is that the water is really cold -- to stay comfortable, you have to wear a lot of exposure protection, which of course mandates a LOT of lead. The gear becomes heavy, bulky and annoying, and anything you can do to minimize the total dry weight of your equipment is worth doing. In addition, to make a good horizontal diving position easy, you can't carry 25 or 30 pounds of lead around your waist. It just doesn't work. So, if you walk up and down the parking area at any of our local dive sites, you will see a very high percentage of backplate systems, because they a) have no intrinsic buoyancy, so you don't have to wear lead just to sink the BC, and b) they become part of your total ballast, and put it up on your back where it helps you balance.
As far as regulators go, it's not a bad idea around here to get something that's environmentally sealed. Between our air and water temperatures in the winter, freeze-related freeflows can happen.
I would also recommend a set of good, stiff paddle fins, like Jet fins, Hollis F1s, or Mares Power Planas. You need to punch to push a dry suit and steel tank and 30 pounds of lead through the water. Get spring or elastic straps on anything you buy, because once you are in all that exposure protection and wearing all that gear, you are about as agile as a Sherman tank, and the last thing you want to be doing is struggling with adjusting fin straps!
Anyway, shoot me a PM if you'd like to drop by the house some day and have a look at the gear we have. We have a bit of a dive shop in our basement, and we can show you what we've concluded over the last nine years works well in Puget Sound.
