Diving With A Scuba Dry Suit

Scuba Dry Suits are a necessary evil in cold water diving.

No matter how good of a diver you think you are, diving with a scuba dry suit for the first time will make you feel like a newbie. One of my instructors said it best when he said, “Learning to use a dry suit is like learning to dive all over again.” How true.

A dry suit turns your whole body into an airspace. It takes time to get used to the change and you’ll likely find that it’s hard to control your buoyancy.

There are entire classes dedicated to teaching the nuances and potential dangers of wearing a dry suit.

Here are a few quick pointers to give you an idea of what those classes will be like.

Avoiding the Dry Suit Squeeze

As I mentioned earlier, scuba dry suits are one giant airspace and airspaces compress when pressure increases, when you go underwater.

This compression can cause the folds in your suit to squeeze and pinch unpleasant places. To avoid singing soprano, many divers use their scuba dry suits as buoyancy compensators. They’ll let a little air in their dry suit as they descend to control their buoyancy and prevent squeezes from occurring.

This works well for your basic dives, but if you end up carrying twin steel cylinders for a more advanced dive, you’ll have to learn to use some combination of your dry suit and your buoyancy compensator to deal with the extra weight.

Avoid Uncontrollable Accents

Some of you more experienced divers read that heading and chuckled.

You figure you’ve moved far beyond the point where you could make a mistake that would send you to spinning out of control to the surface. That may be true in normal dive gear, but dry suits are completely different.

For example, let’s say you’re diving to 70 feet (20 meters) and you’ve been slowly filling your dry suit to maintain your buoyancy and prevent a squeeze. You see something cool under a ledge so you, the great and agile diver, decide to go into a head down position so you can see it better.

When you do, all the air in your dry suit goes to your feet expanding as it goes up. You notice that you’re slowly rising and try to right yourself but find it’s harder than you thought. Now you’re 10 feet (3 meters) higher than you were and you’re starting to accelerate out of control.

What do you do?

You need to dump the excess air so you can regain control of your buoyancy. You need to move the air to your arm or shoulder or anywhere you have an air dump valve.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t include your feet. What you need to do is tuck into a ball and roll yourself into a head-up position. When you do, the air will move from your feet to your shoulders and head where you can safely dump it.

Tragedy averted.

Dry suits are unlike any other piece of equipment you can buy. They require special training and a lot of experience to use correctly, but the extra effort will be well worth it if you dive waters colder than 70 degrees (21 C) frequently.

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