Drysuit lessons learned

This weekend we headed down to Portsea – the missus to go snorkling at Popes Eye while I showed up armed with a brand new drysuit. In fact I was diving a whole bunch of gear for the first time. My mate James lent me his entire twin-set arrangement – something I’ve also been mulling the shift to. I wasn’t really in a hurry to move to a dry suit, popular as they are in Victoria due to the cold water. I don’t really feel the cold for some reason, my semi-dry wetsuit is fine temperature wise but it’s also a poor fit and is damaged in a few places. Turned out the dollar difference between a good quality semi and a real drysuit wasn’t that much do the great prices on Tusa’s gear these days.

So in I go under the pier with Mark from Aquability, my dive shop, his partner and the rest of the shore divers. Couple of us diving drysuits for the first time and as with all significant gear changes, it’s a really damn good idea to test it out in the shallows first. The experience was pretty interesting. Firstly, the backplate and wing set-up is definately more balanced trim wise than a BCD, and the fact there’s air in the drysuit also lends itself to a great cruisy horizonal trim. However as normal I only carried enough weight to get under in the shallows which meant I was knocking about with no air in the wing at all. They might be balanced well at depth but with no air a twinset is a heck of a lot of weight on your back, no more barrel rolls for me…

I ran into this issue with the drysuit where air collects in the feet making it very hard to vent, you have to orientate feet down and try vent from the shoulder. It was tiring after awhile but I reckoned I had the hang of it, and it’d be fine at depth where it would be easier to maneuvre feet down, right? Wrong…

We go off the the proper boat dive, I hook up with James to buddy up with. First half of the dive is great. Trim is excellent, it’s very smooth and glidey, and it’s nice carrying around such large amounts of gas in a twinset – we were aiming for a 50-min total run-time. Everything was going great for the first half of the dive, then as we ascended, the air in the drysuit expanded and collected in my feet again. So I attempted to invert and vent from the shoulder but wasn’t adept at it. This maneouvre would also also lose a lot of depth to the point I decided to abort and swim down and try again. Obviously the further up I go the worse it’ll get if I can’t vent.

I had to perform this maneuvre three times and failed every time. This was absolutely exhausting. In the end I swam right the bottom, grabbed hold of some kelp and planted my feed on the ground. James saw I was in distress and came to assist venting. He later said he could see it was collecting in my shoulder rather than the vent. At any rate it was done, we carried on but it really wasn’t a great experience. This started at about 16 meters so looking back I wasn’t in massive danger, I could have just gently swum down, slowly ascended. No chance of a safety stop though, I was just infuriated at the time that I couldn’t solve it.

Amusingly since we were both on different gear than usual neither of us had an SMB and ended up a long way from the dive boat. Fortunately they saw us anyway, haha. By this point I had a massive CO2 headache, something which I know too well from my tendancy to skip-breath but this time it was entirely exertion based. It seems I’m reluctant to gulp enough air under workload for whatever reason.

In all, it was a relatively minor diving accident with no major harm done but it was a good demonstration of just why people extensively test stuff out in shallows. The moral of the story is that I was aware there was some issue I needed to solve on the pier test. Next time I shore-test new equipment I should be absolutely certain I have it nailed before taking it on a boat dive. To fix the issue I need to be aware of body position when trying to vent, I’ll also use some leg clips or possibly ankle weights to avoid the problem. I also need to fit some sort of padding to the inlet valve of the suit to avoid the nasty bruise I got from the suit squeeze.