Wetsuit Layering for Cayman Islands

[releck97]

3mm full for me in Feb. does the trick. 3 days until I'll be blowing bubbles and drinking ironshore bock...mmm...

 

[Lopez116]

I'm following this thread as well. I dove this past August w/no wetsuit and was never cold at all. I'm going in April and I realize that is pretty different than August water temps.

I hate wearing wetsuits and would like to avoid if at all possible.

+1 on the iron shore bock and caybrew!

 

[BettyfromToronto]

South 4 Scuba: Your post made me laugh. I too wore a 7mm hood when I learned to dive in the Great Lakes and I said never again once I started diving again recently with my newly certified husband and only down south. That is why I love my beanie. I think it is only .5 or 1mm but that is enough.

I remember fighting to get my 7mm wetsuit on but now my 3mm just pulls on so easy. What a difference. Gear seems lighter too.

I'll never go back to cold water diving again when I can do 4 dive trips a year in the Caribbean. (Plus we're moving to Cozumel next year so I can safely say "never")

Betty

 

[Akimbo]

...Most of your heat is lost through your head….

Not really accurate, especially in such warm water.

“Most heat loss from the head” is a myth because it misinterprets the data. As far as I know, the world’s navies are the only ones interested enough to spend serious money on controlled immersion tests.

I saw a Navy study in the 1970s on hypothermia which indicated that ~50% of a diver’s heat loss was through respiration when water temperatures were at 10° C/50° F. The heat loss shifted something like 15% toward respiration on helium mixes below 3% oxygen. This makes sense when you consider that there is about 70 M³/750 Ft³ of surface area in adult lungs. About 50% of the remaining heat loss was through the head when in contact with water at the same temperature.

The verbal explanation we got from Navy hyperbaric docs was it was because of high blood flow near the skin on the skull. I don’t know the methodology used. I understand that there are a lot of newer studies done at EDU (US Navy Experimental Diving Unit) on combat swimmers.

Keep in mind that these conclusions were based on loss of core temperature rather than comfort. The percentages shift wildly with water temperature and suit effectiveness. Muscle mass, work load, age, time, and gender also play huge roles. Hypothermia studies of people in warm water will not provide much guidance here since they were conducted on people in life jackets (head out of water)...