Diving? Across the winter? Too right!

I want to dive all year round.  I’m not addicted to diving, of course.  I could give I up any time I want.  It’s my choice to have the kit and the training that allows me to be out whenever the conditions permit.
I started out my diving career in a wetsuit, a badly fitting, compressed, slightly smelly dive centre wetsuit.  It wasn’t described to me in those terms of course – it was a semi-dry suit, which is a term that has always puzzled me.  Semi-dry must by definition be semi-wet and how wet do you have to be before you are just wet?  Maybe my approach to life is too scientific but wet and dry are opposites and in my world ‘damp’ is still a form of wet.  So there I am in a wetsuit.  On my 9th dive, whilst on a diving course, I had my first hit of hypothermia.  It was a sunny day in Cornwall, but an old and poor fitting wetsuit was enough to make me cold in the water and then the wind chill back on the boat sapped my remaining core temperature.  I just remember feeling extraordinarily tired as I huddled down into the bottom of the RIB and passed out.  It took 3 or 4 days before I felt well again and the experience was enough to send me off to find out about the dangerous world of dry suit diving.

My Diving Office at the time thought that drysuit diving was best left to the experienced guys so his ruling was that only Sports Divers with at least 2 years diving could use drysuits.  (And just in case you were wondering, yes Nitrox was the devil’s gas.)  I went outside the club for my training and have never looked back.  The first training session wasn’t auspicious. Despite the 5am arrival at Stoney Cove we still didn’t manage to get into the water until after some other divers had been in and come out.  The water dripping off their kit froze on the path and my buddies and instructor slid elegantly down into the water.*  The instructor I was diving with provided a membrane suit without any undersuit, but I was reassured that hiking socks, tracksuit bottoms and a long sleeved t-shirt would be fine.  The sweatshirt I’d brought was a layer too far and would have “doubled the amount of lead” I was carrying, so it was left in the car.  Needless to say I was freezing during and after the dive.  Inversion drills aren’t funny when your feet come out of the suit boots but I was so cold that I didn’t notice until I tried to fin.  It seems funny now, but as an instructor I would be mortified if I had taught such a poor course.  Half the students in my group gave up diving totally shortly afterwards!

So now I am an instructor I am acutely aware of hypothermia.  We’re taught on instructor courses that your kit as an instructor should mirror your students.  All of my instructor team wear dry suits, so it’s natural that so do our students.  Besides, there’s no point trying to teach someone whose only thoughts revolve around wanting to be somewhere warmer.  Our students not only get drysuit training but proper undersuits and socks as well.  We explain the cooling properties of sweat on cotton t-shirts and frown on those who keep mentioning that their mate in [insert name of a.n.other UK diving location here] has just been learning in a wetsuit – and they said it was sooo much easier.  Less dives and less to remember.  And ultimately less diving too!

Around the Isle of Man the sea hits it’s coldest at the end of February, beginning of March.  Over 120 years of continuous data recording at the sadly closed Port Erin Marine Lab have shown this to be the case.  It’ll bottom out at around 4 degrees and dry suits become essential.    Every so often the devil inside me offers the newly qualified diver with the ‘mate who learned in a wetsuit in the Irish Sea’ the chance to do a wetsuit dive.  That is usually the end of the topic and within a couple of weeks they’ll be in the dive centre being measured up for their drysuit.  This ensures that they too have the kit for that year-round hope that the wind will stop blowing, the swell will subside and the vis will superb. They join me in the ranks of fevered weather watchers just looking for the gap in Atlantic low pressure systems. The winter storms have stripped the kelp off the rocks now and this breathes a whole new perspective into our favourite sites.  Maybe I am addicted to diving. Winter diving?  Bring it on!
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*I lied about the elegant part.