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Old 05/22/2004, 10:33 AM
skylsdale skylsdale is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: Central WA
Posts: 2,217
1. Warm is relative... if you are tired, (ie, multiple dives) you have likely already burned the calories necesary to warm the surrounding layer of water in your wet suit. You'll grow uncomfortable much quicker. You can pre heat this layer of water by pouring heated water into your suit prior to the 2nd dive.

That's definitely true. I wouldn't say I was uncomfortably cold, but I noticed toward the end of my second dive (especially when I was fairly inactive during the safety stop) that I realized I was a littly chilly. The first dive I was fine. I'm not totally convinced of the preheating method: tried it before the second dive, and after a minute or two in the water, I couldn't tell any difference.

3. A proper hood design makes temps much more bearable by ten degrees at least.

Yeah, I ordered all my personal gear assuming that I'd be doing pretty much all my diving here in PNW (the Sound is only 2.5 hrs away). Everything is 6.5 mm--of course. My hood worked great, and I never noticed any discomfort around my head. Even my gloves worked MUCH better than any other ones I have tried before (they have a sleeve that goes about 2/3 of the way up my forearm).

I think that when I have the opportunity to really start diving regularly over in the sound and some of the lakes around here, I will definitely go with a drysuit. As I said earlier in this thread, the colder winter months are some of the best diving in the PNW because there aren't any plankton blooms to contend with. A wetsuit would still be possible, but a drysuit would definitely help keep you warmer during surface intervals as you're not sitting at a picnic table in the wind and rain.

Thanks for the info! Hopefully I'll be diving Hood Canal a few times before summer is over. If I can I'll try to get ahold of a camera and snap some shots to post. I'm definitely more comfortable and familiar with tropical life due to my experience with reefkeeping, but there is so much here to see, and it so completely different.