Staying warm but avoiding overheating in the water is a joint effort between the drysuit and the undersuit. Looking around there are plenty of options available, all promising to keep you warm, but ultimately which ones are the best?

One of our big goals here at The Adventure Junkies is to make your life easier when it comes to gear shopping. In this guide, we’ll walk you through which drysuit undergarments are the best, and when and where you can best use them.

For more of our top scuba gear recommendations, check out the Best Dry Suits. 

Reviews - The Best Scuba Diving Drysuit Undergarments

Scubapro Climasphere

Specs

• Material: Fleece
• Part of a Layer: No
• Warmth: *

Features

• 2-piece suit with a full body undersuit
• Shorty-like top for additional warmth
• Thumb and foot loops
• Neoprene ankle and wrist cuffs

BEST FOR: DIVING IN TEMPERATE AND COLD WATERS, BY CHOOSING TO WEAR EITHER ONE OR BOTH LAYERS

PROS: Two-piece gives more flexibility, cuffs and loops make putting the drysuit on much easier

CONS: Two-piece design can be bulky around the midriff, chest and shoulders area, not easy to route a P-valve, somewhat heavy

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Fourth Element Halo3D

View Women's Version

Specs

• Material: Dual Layered Stretch with SPACETEK
• Part of a Layer: Yes
• Warmth: ****

Features

• Thumb and foot loops
• Right arm pockets
• P-valve holes
• Three-layer construction with SPACETEK insulated panels

BEST FOR: COLD WATER DIVING, OR ULTRA-LONG DIVES IN TEMPERATE WATERS, IDEAL FOR COMBINING WITH THE XEROTHERM BASE LAYER

PROS: Super warm even when soaking wet, pockets, thumb and foot loops make donning the drysuit very easy, P-Valve holes allow for easy routing of the hoses

CONS: Expensive, can be bulky especially when worn with base layer

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Fourth Element Arctic

Specs

• Material: Dual Layer Fleece-Like
• Part of a Layer: Yes
• Warmth: ***

Features

• Thumb and foot loops make it easier to put on the drysuit
• Will continue to provide warmth even after minor leaks

BEST FOR: IDEAL FOR COLDER WATERS WHEN USED ALONE, WHEN COMBINED WITH THE XEROTHERM CAN BE USED IN VERY COLD WATERS

PROS: Very warm, lightweight, and combines very well with Fourth Element base layers, stays warm when wet

CONS: Somewhat expensive, does not offer ideal routing for a P-valve, and can take a while to dry

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Waterproof Warmtec HD 200G Fiberfill

Specs

• Material: 100% Nylon Taffeta/Polyester
• Part of a Layer: No
• Warmth: **

Features

• Four pockets
• Front entry zipper
• Mesh shoulders
• Elastic waist
• Zippered legs

BEST FOR: WATER TEMPERATURES FROM 45-65 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT

PROS: Great value for the money, snug fitting, four pockets for stashing essentials

CONS: Not for the coldest waters

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Aqua Lung MKO

Specs

• Material: Bamboo Blend
• Part of a Layer: No
• Warmth: *

Features

• 1-piece suit with rear convenience flap
• 2-way torso/relief zipper
• Non-corroding YKK zippers
• Smooth Lycra stirrups
• Elastic thumb loops

BEST FOR: A MOISTURE-WICKING BASE LAYER

PROS: Additional Spandex content results in an extreme stretch suitable for all body types

CONS: Not easy to route a P-valve, not suitable for extreme conditions

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HOW TO CHOOSE THE BEST DRYSUIT UNDERGARMENTS

WARMTH

The key factor when choosing the best drysuit undergarment is how warm they can keep you for the type of diving you are doing. Since minor leaks are a fact of life when diving with a drysuit, it is crucially important to know whether your undergarment will still keep you warm when it is wet.

LAYERING

On land, layering your clothing is key to staying warm, and it’s no different underwater. Multiple layers are far more effective for maintaining thermal protection. The best drysuit undergarments can be layered as part of a bigger system—providing warmth and flexibility no matter what the water temperature or diving conditions. One drawback to look out for is that with layering, the undergarment can end up being very bulky and hinder movement and performance, and even negatively affect your buoyancy control.

DESIGN & MATERIAL

There are several accessories that make life so much easier when using a drysuit. The best drysuit undergarments have foot and thumb loops that prevent the suit from rolling up your limbs when you’ve zipped up your drysuit. They should also make it relatively easy to route hoses from P-valves. The material the suit is made from is also important since it should wick away moisture and keep the diver’s skin dry throughout the dive.

COST

It’s a fact of life—cost does play a part in determining whether you buy a suit or not and whether you can justify the cost. A dive professional making several hundred dives a year might opt for a very expensive suit, whilst someone who only does 10-15 dives per year might find the price prohibitive.

The post Best Drysuit Undergarments of 2022 appeared first on The Adventure Junkies.

One of our big goals here at The Adventure Junkies is to help make your experience underwater the best it can be. Learning to master your buoyancy will make you a better scuba diver – you’ll have more control over yourself and become more confident underwater.

WHY IS BUOYANCY CONTROL IMPORTANT?

The first step to improving your buoyancy is to recognize why it’s so important in the first place. As you learned in your open water scuba course, divers aim to be neutrally buoyant. This means, while you’re diving, you don’t float up to the surface and you don’t sink down to the bottom.

Good buoyancy…

1. Protects both you and the marine environment. If you don’t have control over your buoyancy, you could crash into delicate corals or land on a sea urchin.

2. Improves your air consumption and reduces fatigue. When you’re neutrally buoyant, you don’t have to work so hard to maintain your position in the water.

3. Helps you control your ascent and decent rates which will decrease your risk of decompression sickness.

4. Increases your confidence in the water and massively improves your overall diving experience.

If you have ambitions to become a wreck or cave diver, mastering your buoyancy is a top priority. Since this type of diving requires you to go into overhead environments, you can’t risk hitting your head or stirring up a bunch of silt in a cave.

BUOYANCY FUNDAMENTALS

To master any skill, you need to know the fundamental principles. Perfect buoyancy is the art of finding the perfect balance, like performing a hill start in a manual transmission car. The balancing of the forward movement through the accelerator, with the weight of the car pulling you back, using the clutch and handbrake, is no different to finding the perfect buoyancy.

In the water your body displaces the surrounding liquid, exactly like when you sink in a bath and the water level goes up. Your body is pushed up by a force equal to the weight of the water your body is displacing. Neutral buoyancy is the point where the weight of your body and all its equipment pushing you down is equal to the weight of the water your body has displaced, it’s a fine balancing act.

THE 4 KEYS TO PERFECT BUOYANCY

There are four keys to perfecting buoyancy: trim, weighting, breathing, and BCD use. Master all four and you too will become a master of buoyancy.

1. TRIM

Trim is a flat and steady position in the water, also known as the prone position. To achieve this, you need to be in the most efficient position in the water: body completely flat, with the knees bent at 90 degrees, and your fins pointing backwards. This position is ideal since you present the least surface area, which leads to the most streamlined position. When combined with proper frog kicks, this position allows you to simply kick and glide with all the power from your kick strokes being directed backwards.

2. WEIGHTING

Proper weighting is the second key to perfect buoyancy. Many novice divers are too heavy underwater. All the extra weight they are carrying means they must compensate for it by putting air into their BCD. It is much better to drop those extra pounds and dive with the correct weight.

To find out if you are weighted correctly, follow this simple check. On the surface, you should float at eye level with a totally empty BCD. When you inhale, you should rise out of the water, and when you exhale deeply, you should sink until your eyes are submerged. Adjust your weights and perform weight checks until you are perfectly weighted.

Check out Sport Diver’s buoyancy calculator to help determine how much lead you need for your dive.

3. BREATHING

Once you’ve started to get a feel for neutral buoyancy, you’ll need to bring your lungs into play. Using your lungs, you can make minor buoyancy changes without the need to inflate or deflate your BCD.

When you breathe in and out, you are effectively adding or taking air out of your overall buoyancy balance. If you want to drop a little in the water, just exhale a little more than normal. On the other hand, if you want to rise in the water column, then inhale a little more deeply than usual. In either case, once you’ve executed the manoeuvre before returning to normal breathing, you’ll maintain your new position in the water column.

Divers should be aware they can’t keep repeating this process endlessly, eventually they’ll have to adjust the buoyancy in their BCD by either inflating or deflating. When practicing using your lungs for buoyancy control, it is vital to remember the golden rule of scuba diving. Never hold your breath! Remember to breathe continuously.

4. USE YOUR BCD

Learning to use your BCD perfectly does take some time, until you develop a ‘feel’ for it. The most important aspect to using a BCD is not to confuse the inflate and deflate buttons for up and down button respectively. It might sound counterintuitive to beginners, but they are the opposite! You add air as you descend to maintain neutral or slightly negative buoyancy, and you release air when ascending to maintain depth control and stay neutrally buoyant.

The second mistake inexperienced divers make is pressing the buttons for too long. You should only use short presses of both the inflate and deflate buttons. Try for no more than about half a second of inflation and about a second of deflation. You can always repeat the press until you hit the point you want. Long applications in either direction will regularly take you past your neutral point, resulting in yo-yo diving, and force you to take corrective action.

VIDEO: BUOYANCY & TRIM

To better grasp what can be achieved, check out technical instructor trainer Mathew Partridge demonstrating the art of perfect buoyancy.

OUR TOP 3 TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR BUOYANCY CONTROL

There are several things new divers can do to improve their buoyancy skill. What they need to remember is there are no quick fixes. Your buoyancy will improve very quickly at first, but it does take time and practice to truly become a master of buoyancy.

TIP #1: TAKE A COURSE

One of the first things you can do to improve your buoyancy in a day or two is to take a buoyancy improvement course, all major training agencies offer one. PADI has the Peak Performance Buoyancy speciality, while SDI has the Advanced Buoyancy course. Whichever agency you choose, you’ll find that most of courses follow a very similar structure. One of the biggest benefits is getting instruction hands on that is tailor-made for solving any of the issues you are having with buoyancy.

TIP #2: ROTATE AND DEFLATE

A very common problem with novice divers is not being able to deflate their BCD properly, since they fail to keep the exhaust port of the corrugated hose as the highest point of the system. Thus, they end up going through the motions without actually deflating the BCD, because the air gets trapped.

There’s a very simple solution to this: as the diver swims through the water, they should drop their right shoulder, raise their left and turn their head to the left. By rotating like this, two things happen even when swimming in a horizontal position. Firstly, the corrugated hose becomes the highest point of the BCD, helping to release air. Secondly, the diver can see the hose and will know for sure whether air is being vented out or not.

Once divers have mastered using their inflator hose they should then graduate to using their shoulder and kidney dumps. By then, learning to use them properly is relatively easy since they have developed the ‘feel’ for buoyancy.

TIP #3: PRACTICE ‘MAKES PERFECT’ IN THE SHALLOWS

Never has a saying been truer, especially when it comes to perfecting buoyancy. Like all motor skills, divers need time, patience, and more practice to truly perfect their buoyancy. It is best to practice in shallow water since minor changes can create big changes in buoyancy. Perfecting your buoyancy technique in the shallows will mean it is perfect everywhere.

The post How To Improve Your Buoyancy Control When Scuba Diving appeared first on The Adventure Junkies.

Staying warm underwater is key for having a safe and enjoyable time underwater to do this you’ll need some kind of thermal protection suit. Divers have two main choices – wetsuits or drysuits. Which one to choose is not just down to water temperature, there are other factors to consider.

One of our big goals here at The Adventure Junkies is to give you the knowledge you need to make important scuba gear buying decisions. In this article you’ll discover the difference between a wetsuit and a drysuit, the advantages and disadvantages of each and one which is best for you.

HOW DO WETSUITS & DRYSUITS WORK?

To learn which type of exposure protection suit is best for you, you need to understand how each one works.

Wetsuits work by trapping a layer of water against your skin and reducing the flow of water in and out of the suit. Your body heat then warms this water up to close to body temperature, so that you are surrounded by a warm layer of water. The insulation is provided by the neoprene fabric of the suit.

Neoprene is a foam-like material trapping thousands of tiny air bubbles; these spaces are what provide the insulating properties of this material. The thicker the neoprene of the suit, the more insulated and warm it is. This is why you can use a 2 mm suit in the tropics, while in cold water you can opt for a 7 mm or double up to 14 mm.

Drysuits are totally different, they are completely watertight with seals around the wrists and ankles. This leaves the diver dry in the suit, wrapped in a layer of air. Most drysuits do not provide any insulation or warmth themselves, a diver stays warm by wearing undergarments inside the suit.

There are many different garments available depending on how cold the water is, from light undergarments suitable for the tropics to battery powered heated ones for ice diving. So, drysuits can be used in a larger range of temperatures.

Unlike wetsuits which are all made of neoprene, drysuits are made of either neoprene or a trilaminate material.

PROS & CONS OF A WETSUIT

ADVANTAGES

Wetsuits are easy to find, and if you get the right wetsuit or two, you can happily dive most places on the planet.

There are plenty of options and styles available, and almost every dive centre in the world has them as key pieces of rental equipment.

Wetsuits are generally much cheaper than drysuits.

Maintenance is simple. Just rise your suit after every dive with fresh water and hang it up. SDITDI gives some more tips for taking care of your wetsuit.

DISADVANTAGES

Wetsuits are not the best choice for colder waters. Even in warm water divers can get cold on long dives.

Putting a wet wetsuit on is unpleasant. This is why some divers who regularly venture on liveaboard trips have 2 suits that they alternate between dives so that they are always putting on a nice and dry wetsuit.

Loss of thermal insulation the deeper you go. This is one of the biggest problems with wetsuits, particularly for those who like deep diving. This is due to the neoprene, which is full of air bubbles, being compressed with depth.

PROS & CONS OF A DRYSUIT

ADVANTAGES

Drysuits are warm, super warm! If you plan on doing any kind of diving in chilly water, they are a must in your cold water gear dive bag. As mentioned earlier, just select the right undergarments and you are ready to go, even in icy waters.

Getting changed into and out of the suit in colder climates is a breeze – no more struggling with a cold, wet and clammy wetsuit.

Improve your diving. A drysuit makes it easier to establish and maintain perfect trim (body shape) in the water – this is one of the many reasons technical divers prefer to use them. Although they can be cumbersome, the benefits of drysuits tempt a significant number of divers, according to DUI, One of the world’s leaders in drysuit technology.

DISADVANTAGES

Drysuits are more expensive than wetsuits. Entry-level suits cost several hundred dollars, and high-end suits several thousand.

Not as easy to use underwater. Divers need training and time to master their drysuit. Unlike wetsuits, drysuits need to be inflated during diving – like a BCD – to stop them from squeezing the diver. This creates task-loading on inexperienced divers since they are now using the suit and BCD to control their buoyancy.

Require a lot of maintenance both post-dive and seasonally. You will need to keep the zipper well lubricated so it doesn’t break and protect the seals when the suit will not be used for a long time. There’s an inside joke amongst drysuit divers that they lavish more attention on their suit than they do on their first born!

VIDEO: HOW TO DRYSUIT LIKE A PRO

To get a good idea of the amount of preparation and efforts required to use a drysuit, check out this video from Magma Dive about gearing up before a dive in Iceland.

WHAT ABOUT SEMI-DRY SUITS?

Semi-dry suits are basically a thick wetsuit with better seals (gaskets) at the wrist neck and ankles. These seals keep water circulation to a minimum. While this type of suit does tend to be warmer than a wetsuit of similar thickness, you still get wet.

These suits are typically more expensive than your standard wetsuit. They are a good option for divers looking for extra warmth but don’t want to splurge on a drysuit or go through the training required to use one.

WHEN SHOULD I USE EACH SUIT?

The key deciding factor on which suit to choose is the water temperature. The table below should give you a good guide on when to use each. Keep in mind that this is just a rough guide; you need to factor in your own individual comfort and tolerance to cold water.

+80F°/26C°: 2mm wetsuit

68-79F°/20-26C°: 7mm wetsuit

58-68F°/14-20C°:7mm double layer wetsuit/ semi drysuit/ full drysuit

– 58F°/14C°: Full drysuit

WHY DO SOME DIVERS WEAR DRYSUITS IN THE TROPICS?

There are two types of divers who wear drysuits in the tropics. The first are recreational divers who are quite susceptible to cold, especially on multiple dives a day over multiple days, and choose to wear a drysuit to stay warmer and enjoy their diving.

The second group are technical divers; a significant number opt for drysuits even in the tropics for multiple reasons. Some divers prefer to dive the same equipment configuration – drysuit included – all the time.

Other divers will get cold on longer technical dives, and some even prefer the enhanced body trim a drysuit affords its wearer. Divers involved with deep trimix diving wear drysuits since the water at depth – even in the tropics – tends to be colder, and breathing helium-rich mixtures removes a lot of heat from the diver’s body due to the high specific heat capacity of helium.

SO, WHICH SUIT IS BEST FOR ME?

So now that we’ve gone over all details about the differences between wetsuits or drysuits, do you know which suit is best for you? Unfortunately there’s no one size fits all answer! Most divers have multiple suits to cover their different needs. Full times dive pros may have as many as 4 that they use as and when needed!

If you dive in cold water often and are happy to invest in your comfort and warmth, a drysuit is a clear winner. If you don’t have the budget for a drysuit but still need some decent exposure protection, consider looking at a semidry suit and some extra accessories like a hooded vest, thick dive boots and gloves.

The post The Differences Between a Wetsuit and a Drysuit appeared first on The Adventure Junkies.