Snorkeling with a drysuit

Please register or login

Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.

Benefits of registering include

  • Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
  • A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
  • You can make this box go away

Joining is quick and easy. Log in or Register now!

Messages
4
Reaction score
0
Location
Bridgeton, NJ
# of dives
100 - 199
I'm looking to buy a drysuit for snorkeling and diving in cold water. My concern is in the snorkeling end. I do a lot of u/w photography in lakes and streams where a lot of the fish are shy and scuba bubbles spook them so usually I weight myself to be neutral at about 20' in a wet suit and in an emergency I could always drop my weights and pop to the surface. So how can I control my buoyancy safely in a dry suit without a tank? Thanks, Bill
 
Buy the drysuit for diving, keep the wetsuit for snorkeling, once you have the drysuit just try it once and you’ll understand.
 
you might want to consider a 7 mm freedive wetsuit for very cold water freediving/snorkeling. Buoyancy control can be adjusted by precise weighting that corresponds to your expected depth. Being over weighted while freediving is something to avoid.
 
Squeeze is an issue, reducing your flexibility as you descend. When diving you balance this with a squirt of air into the drysuit which is dumped on ascent. You can’t do this with freediving unless you’re using a suit inflate cylinder.

A drysuit is not the tool for the job.
 
Squeeze is an issue, reducing your flexibility as you descend. When diving you balance this with a squirt of air into the drysuit which is dumped on ascent. You can’t do this with freediving unless you’re using a suit inflate cylinder.

A drysuit is not the tool for the job.
Thanks for everyone who replied. I guess I'm going to have to suck it up and use my wetsuit.
 
From a personal perspective, it all depends what you mean by snorkelling and drysuits.

As an ancient lifelong snorkeller, never a scuba diver, I do remember the days in the mid twentieth century when a drysuit was a genuine option for snorkellers, or "skin divers" as they would have been known back then. The difference was that the dry suits in the 1950s and early 1960s were light, usually two-piece garments, without bulky valves, worn with fabric thermal undersuits. Learning how to don, vent and seal the suit was a must right from the start.
1637940646247.jpeg
After undergoing surgery almost twenty years ago, I decided to do a little snorkelling in the cold waters of the North Sea off the coast of North East England. My exposure suit of choice was at first the close-fitting safety-yellow vintage So-Lo Marx Skooba-"totes" drysuit you see above from the historical diving equipment collection I amassed over the decades. This suit kept me perfectly warm and dry while snorkelling on the surface and taking the occasional shallow dive after opening the wrist or face seals to vent it. To keep this irreplaceable historical suit in reasonable condition, I later purchased a new Hydroglove replica vintage drysuit, which turned out to be equally serviceable against the elements while snorkelling, based as it was on the original Skooba-"totes" design.

In recent years, I read a report somewhere about dry-suited snorkellers swimming with seals off the Farne Islands, many miles further up the coast from where I live. These snorkellers, who used modern-style bulky loose-fitting drysuits to keep warm and dry, spent all or most of their time floating and swimming on the surface while they were in the company of these marine mammals.
 
Buy the drysuit for diving, keep the wetsuit for snorkeling, once you have the drysuit just try it once and you’ll understand.
Unless you snorkel in Iceland(Silfra). You would not go wet there. Try Silfra and you will understand.
 

Back
Top Bottom