Everything You Need to Know About Drysuits
When you decide that you want to expand your dives to deeper and colder water, you need to have the right equipment for the adventure. Getting the exposure protection makes all the difference in how comfortable and successful your upcoming dive will be. Instead of relying solely on wetsuits, you should look into investing in a drysuit for any cold and deep water dives for optimal protection and performance. Knowing the different components of a drysuit and what makes it tick will help you decide which suit to buy.
What Are Drysuits?
One of the main objectives of any type of exposure protection you use while scuba diving revolves around minimizing heat loss. The longer you can mitigate this and retain more of your body heat, the longer you can go underwater. While wetsuits provide suitable skintight protection in warmer water and allow for minimal water to enter the material to help regulate your temperature, drysuits operate on a different principle. The drysuit's looser fit will enable divers to wear additional thermal and insulating layers underneath the suit. By keeping an insulating layer of air between the drysuit and your body, you can better control the overall heat loss. The following are some of the additional advantages that drysuits provide divers:
Mobility
Drysuits require a certain amount of experience and pre-dive training before you feel entirely comfortable. While a skintight wetsuit provides divers with a great deal of freedom and flexibility, the looser drysuit can feature more drag than you are accustomed to feeling. Learning how to account for that increased drag and figure out how to best maneuver underwater will be crucial to diving in a drysuit. Enrolling in a training course prior to your first open water dive in a drysuit will help better prepare you for the differences that the exposure suit has compared to wetsuits.
Natural Buoyancy
Staying buoyant during a dive helps make your experience that much more enjoyable. In a wetsuit, you'll begin to lose that inherent buoyancy the further you go down. With a drysuit, the layer of air between your body and the suit helps maintain buoyancy. Divers can control the amount of air inside that layer and help counterbalance any compression at that depth.
Condition Flexibility
Drysuits allow divers the ability to traverse a wide range of watery conditions. Depending on the water temperature, you can add additional thermal garments to help keep your body warm and adjust accordingly in either direction. Thanks to this versatility, drysuit users can enjoy year-round diving since they have increased options for handling the potential heat loss of a given dive.
You Have Options
When picking the right drysuit for your diving needs, you want to find the options out there that fit your diving needs and represent a sound investment. From our selection of the best in DUI and Santi drysuits, you can find the one that works best for your future dives.
Browse the Scubadelphia Diveseekers inventory today to see what we have to offer and get started finding your next drysuit!