From my previous posts regarding kayaking near Stockholm, Sweden, some
of you have suggested I may need to get a wet suit or a dry suit. What
are the tradeoffs of each? I suppose I could have done a google search
on the topic but thought I'd ask this group first.....


Cheers and TIA.

Per Moby Dick:
From my previous posts regarding kayaking near Stockholm, Sweden, some
of you have suggested I may need to get a wet suit or a dry suit. What
are the tradeoffs of each? I suppose I could have done a google search
on the topic but thought I'd ask this group first.....

I'll start it off.

Wet Suit:
-------------------------------------------
- Harder to get on/off
- Bulletproof. No seals to rip. No issues with
shipping water - it's already wet in there.
- Bruise protection from the foam rubber
- Streamlined when you have to swim
- No self-BS: It's either 5mm or 3mm or whatever
- Depending on the suit, may have less freedom
of motion than a dry suit


Bag-Style Dry Suit:
-------------------------------------------
- Easy on/easy off
- If you rip a neck seal, you it can spoil your day
- Ditto if you forget to zip the shoulder zipper. For
that reason, I'd only consider a diagonal-zippered
dry suit like my Kokatat.
- If you ship enough water, the insulation factor goes
down the toilet and, if the weight of your soaked
Polartec is enough and you have to, say, right a
capsized catamaran you can be in deep, deep kimchee.
- Seals last anywhere from one year to a max of three
or four years - then they have to be replaced.
Figure $150 minimum for ankles + wrists + neck.
- No bruise protection
- Negative streamlining
- Finely-tunable thermal protection. You can wear a log
or a little underneath. The downside of is
the self-BS factor...
- There's a self-BS factor: you can kid yourself and wear
enough under it to be comfortable paddling but
be insufficient to survive immersion long enough
- Good freedom of motion in upper body, but there can be
a vacuum pack effect on the legs when immersed - and if
the material is hanging the wrong way (as in the crotch
is too low) your mobility can be severely limited - as
in unable to get to your feet in shore break.


Full Neo Dry Suit
-----------------------------------------------
- Pretty much bulletproof if you don't forget to zip
the shoulder zipper - but even then you're covered
in rubber.
- Easier on/off than a wet suit - but not all that much
- Bruise protection as a wet suit
- Streamlining as a wet suit, but maybe a little less
- Better upper body mobility than a wet suit (assuming it's
made for windsurfing or paddling) but not as much as
a bag top.
- Again, no self-BS factor


Hybrid: Bag Top Neo John (e.g. Bare Polar)
-------------------------------------------------
- Somewhat fault-tolerant. If you rip a seal,
you're still wearing a neo john
- Supreme mobility. All the upper body mobility
of a full bag suit without the vacuum bag
effect.
- Better streamlining than a bag suit, probably
not as good as a wet suit or neo dry suit.
- Bruise protection for the lower body
- Less chance for self-BS bco the neo john.
You can still not wear enough under the top,
but can't go as far down that path as with
a bag suit.
--
PeteCresswell

Just a few thoughts on the thermal protection question...

First rule of thumb - if you couldn't swim comfortably in the water for
however long it takes to re-enter the boat or get ashore, you need some sort
of thermal protection.

Wet Suits - we bought farmer john suits during our first season of kayaking,
and used them for a couple of years - well, sort of...in fact, we didn't use
them as much as we should have, for the following reasons:
- Hard to don and shed.
- Tended to be hot in the boat given much exertion.
- Tended to be cold if sweaty when exercise stopped.
- Tended to chafe.
- Very cold if exposed to wind when wet.

Dry Suits - so, two years ago, we finally bit the bullet, and spent about
$600 each on dry suits - or to be accurate, semi-dry suits - Kokatat
SuperNova suits, breathable fabric, latex wrist seals, neoprene neck seal.
The suits aren't as water-tight as the full drysuit with a latex neck seal,
but they are more comfortable for us and more affordable. They are a quantum
improvement over the wet suits, both in terms of protection and comfort. We
wear ours almost all the time now if we're on salt water (this far north, it
almost never really gets what most folks call 'warm')

Finally, another suggestion - we always carry a dry bag each in the cockpit
which contains everything needed to survive an unexpected night ashore - a
full change of clothes, fire starting materials, 1st aid gear, the makings
and rigging of a crude shelter (8x10sheet Tyvek, folded to fit the bottom of
the bag), and some durable food. In the worse case scenario (flipped, lost
the boats!!!), the bags contain enough survival supplies to get us thru a
couple of days ashore - by then, someone should be looking for us, as we
leave a float plan of some sort either with someone or where it will be
easily found.

Pete, thanks for the mondo comparison writeup.

"(PeteCresswell)" wrote:

Full Neo Dry Suit

For people like me without much brainpower, could you post a link
to a picture of the Full Neo Dry? Web search came up mostly empty.
It sounds like what some call a "Steamer" suit, which is basically
a full wetsuit with waterproof zipper.

Hybrid: Bag Top Neo John (e.g. Bare Polar)

I found this one:
http://www.sailworld.com/bare/bare.htm

Per Bill Tuthill:
For people like me without much brainpower, could you post a link
to a picture of the Full Neo Dry? Web search came up mostly empty.
It sounds like what some call a "Steamer" suit, which is basically
a full wetsuit with waterproof zipper.

You've pretty much got it.


Full Neo Dry:
----------------------------------------------------
http://tinyurl.com/2flcbb (if you look closely, the across-shoulder zipper is
visible)


Bag Top/Neo Bottom:
-----------------------------------------------------
http://tinyurl.com/2aptgm (this one uses latex seals - dryer, more comfortable
at the expense of durability/bulletproofness

http://tinyurl.com/2bpnoj This one may use a different seal material. Dunno for
sure, but I've *seen* bag top/neo bottom suits with neoprene seals. The
tradeoff is bulletproffness vs comfort/dryness. What I hear, though, is that
neo neck seals don't last forever - bco the stretching - but my guess is that
they won't tear open suddenly as latex will.






--
PeteCresswell

On Feb 15, 1:43 pm, "vk1nf" wrote:
Dry Suits - so, two years ago, we finally bit the bullet, and spent about
$600 each on dry suits - or to be accurate, semi-dry suits - Kokatat
SuperNova suits, breathable fabric, latex wrist seals, neoprene neck seal.
The suits aren't as water-tight as the full drysuit with a latex neck seal,
but they are more comfortable for us and more affordable.

Oh NOOOOO! Don't tell me Kokatat bought into the same "damp suit" crap
that that IR promulgated on to the boating community with it's comfy
neo neck, er...'gasket'!

Gimme full latex neck and wrist gaskets, and built-in booties in a
DRYsuit anyday! Anything else is just a damp suit! Yer either dry or
your not, yano? I'm dry! :-) I love my Kokatat GoreTEX drysuit with
latex neck and wrist gaskets. So much so that when I had the neck and
wrist gaskets replaced, I had Kokatat install a pee zipper too! Never
realized how many rapids I ran on a full bladder until I had my pee
zipper! :-)

PS: I bought my Kokatat drysuit from a guy I contacted via RBP, years
ago. Maybe 1998 or so, I think. He sold me his Kokatat drysuit because
he had just made Team Stohlquist, and was gonna be wearing a
Stohlquist drysuit from then on, I believe. $375 for a large Kokatat
GoreTEX drysuit in excellent condition, with built-in neo booties, and
he threw in the 100 weight Mountain Surf body stocking *and* a pair of
size 12 NRS overbooties for protecting the then neo booties in the
drysuit! What a deal, yano? Ahhh, those were the days on RBP! :-)

John Kuthe...

John Kuthe...

Moby Dick wrote:
From my previous posts regarding kayaking near Stockholm, Sweden, some
of you have suggested I may need to get a wet suit or a dry suit. What
are the tradeoffs of each? I suppose I could have done a google search
on the topic but thought I'd ask this group first.....

While Pete's explanation is good, it sounds like it's coming from the
perspective of a whitewater paddler. If your interest is primarily in
sea kayaking - IIRC, that's the case - the issues are somewhat different.

First off, below 50 degree water temp, no wetsuit that you can actually
paddle in comfortably is going to provide adequate protection. In
anything more than a momentary swim, you need a dry suit. Personally, I
think 55-60 degrees is a more realistic lower limit for the 3mm wetsuits
that paddlers typically wear for sea kayaking. I've spent substantial
amounts of time in 40 degree water in a dry suit when teaching rescues
and have swam in water as cold as 30 degrees (sal****er, of course)
comfortably.

The padding/protection factor of neoprene is irrelevant for sea kayaking
unless you intend to be thrashing around in surf or rock gardens. Even
then, I've never found any drawbacks to dry suits. The same is true of
the issue of insulating even when damaged. These things are simply not
significant factors for most sea kayaking.

In my experience, dry suits are DRAMATICALLY more comfortable than
neoprene for the following reasons:

- You stay much drier, though not bone dry. You still have to deal with
perspiration, but with a breathable dry suit (don't even bother with
non-breathable suits), perspiration that may accumulate will dissipate
when your effort level drops. FWIW, I don't know of anyone who paddles
in a neoprene dry suit. IMO, those and non-breathable fabric suits are
not really "dry" suits. Sure, the keep water from the outside away, but
you end up soaked with sweat, so what's the point?

- You have more freedom of movement, unless you buy a suit that's too
small. Speaking of sizing, many companies offer custom sizing if your
body proportions fall significantly outside the general norm.

- For a wetsuit to function optimally, it must fit skin-tight and allow
as little water as possible to intrude (don't buy into the BS that water
in a wetsuit acts as insulation, it's a heatsink). Getting the right fit
can be difficult. Additionally, wetsuits are typically designed for
activities where one is standing or swimming, not sitting, so the fit
changes in a kayak. Custom wetsuits are available, but they cost as much
as a dry suit. The loose fit of a dry suit eliminates these fit issues.

- You can easily vary your insulation in a dry suit for the prevailing
conditions. This is huge factor in both comfort and safety.

- When you take a dry suit off on a cold day, you're not exposing wet,
bare skin to the icy breeze. Slip off the suit, jump in your car and
you're good to go. Worst case, throw on shell gear over your insulating
layers.

- Warnings about seal failures are largely a red herring. Yes, they
definitely do happen, but I have never seen a seal fail while the suit
was being worn. They invariably fail when donning or doffing the suit,
so you KNOW that the seal has failed before you try to use the suit.
Yes, it can stop a trip in it's tracks, but so can a lot of other
things. Seal replacement is a pretty simple DIY job if you're reasonably
handy.

- Ditto the warnings about leaving zippers open. I don't know anyone
who's done that more than once. ;-) And no, it's not because they died.
It's simply a matter of getting into a routine of donning the suit and
closing the zippers, then checking again before you hit the water.

Per Brian Nystrom:
- Warnings about seal failures are largely a red herring. Yes, they
definitely do happen, but I have never seen a seal fail while the suit
was being worn. They invariably fail when donning or doffing the suit,
so you KNOW that the seal has failed before you try to use the suit.
Yes, it can stop a trip in it's tracks, but so can a lot of other
things. Seal replacement is a pretty simple DIY job if you're reasonably
handy.

Never thought of it before, but that seems tb a further justification for
getting a convenience zipper on the dry suit. I got one on my Kokatat and was
regretting it - since it's so easy to just take the top off. But now that
you've mentioned it, it sure would be a bummer to pull into a little beach
somewhere 5 miles into a workout and rip the neck seal.

OTOH, one dry suit maker (I *think* it was Ocean Rodeo - but their web site is
almost as bad as O'Neil's and I can't find the product right now) is or was
making a bag suit with the diagonal zipper long enough to serve the same
function as a convenience zipper.


- Ditto the warnings about leaving zippers open. I don't know anyone
who's done that more than once. ;-) And no, it's not because they died.
It's simply a matter of getting into a routine of donning the suit and
closing the zippers, then checking again before you hit the water.

I've read one first-hand account by somebody far more competent than I am. Like
you say, he didn't die... but it sound like it was a looooong paddle home since
he couldn't operate the shoulder zipper from inside the kayak. Score one for
diagonal zippers.

We did, however lose a guy in southern New Jersey some years back. He had gone
out in a bag dry suit with virtually nothing underneath. Fell in the water,
went hypothermic, and drowned without being able to re-mount the boat.
--
PeteCresswell

Or you could get some neoprene pants and a drop top. I whitewater and sea
kayak in Washington State and the water is very cold and I am perfectly
comfortable both in and out of the water as well as in the boat. I used to
wear a dry top with dry pants for years but never did really like the pants.
I saw some others wearing the neoprene pants that were very good paddlers
and asked them how they liked them. They loved the combination so much that
I thought I'd try it out and now I love it too. I've been in snow melt
waters with these pants and in instructor sea kayak coarses where being in
the ocean for long time periods was mandatory and stayed very warm and
didn't get any water in my drt top either. When it's really cold out and a
swim is possible I also wear some polypro under the pants (as well as the
normal few layers under the top). I've been wearing this combo now for
about 5 years and don't have any complaints.

Courtney

Per Courtney:
When it's really cold out and a
swim is possible I also wear some polypro under the pants (as well as the
normal few layers under the top). I've been wearing this combo now for
about 5 years and don't have any complaints.

That's encouraging bc last fall I dropped a bundle on this combination:

- http://tinyurl.com/22otvg
- http://tinyurl.com/yvt3uz

It got a little too cold a little too fast for me to give the bib john/dry top a
try, but March is on the way...

What do you wear under the dry top?

My plan is to try a neo t-shirt and some neo arms from an old spring suit.
--
PeteCresswell