victorzamora
Contributor
I go vertical in my drysuit with relative frequency. In an overhead, you don't always have a choice. One of my favorite caves has the need to be practically vertical, feet up on the way in....especially if tying in the reel. You approach it, swim straight down, tie off, swim forwards to get into the opening and get yourself back to vertical, and then continue on. It's very silty, so anything other than practically vertical is guaranteed to silt out the whole area. My usual cave has a relatively thin section running vertically. It's not necessary to go vertical, but it adds a lot of space between you and the rock and allows you to take more than one tight path up/down it. I normally go fairly vertical during that ascent/descent, feet-up on my way down and feet-down and my way up. Never a problem.
The trick is to know what your drysuit is going to do before it does it, and prepare for it. When I go vertical, I normally dump a lot of the extra air out of my suit. If going head-up, it prevents my neck seal burping. If I go feet-up, it prevents a runaway ascent. In that cave that requires me to go feet-down, there's no need to add/remove any air to/from the suit as my feet aren't changing depth. I turn in such a way that the air in my suit compresses. Heck, we were on a shallow muck dive with no overhead and a buddy was talking crap about not being able to go feet-up in a drsyuit, so I went feet-up and spun around a bunch, then flipped over and stood on the bottom. No problems. The only way to learn how to do it is to learn what your drysuit will do under different circumstances, and get ahead of it.....this requires experience and awareness, nothing more.
The trick is to know what your drysuit is going to do before it does it, and prepare for it. When I go vertical, I normally dump a lot of the extra air out of my suit. If going head-up, it prevents my neck seal burping. If I go feet-up, it prevents a runaway ascent. In that cave that requires me to go feet-down, there's no need to add/remove any air to/from the suit as my feet aren't changing depth. I turn in such a way that the air in my suit compresses. Heck, we were on a shallow muck dive with no overhead and a buddy was talking crap about not being able to go feet-up in a drsyuit, so I went feet-up and spun around a bunch, then flipped over and stood on the bottom. No problems. The only way to learn how to do it is to learn what your drysuit will do under different circumstances, and get ahead of it.....this requires experience and awareness, nothing more.
