K&L excursions: Adventures in Dry Suit Diving

Having completed our check out dive in the pool earlier in the week, Liesl and I headed to Patriot Scuba in Occoquan, Va early in the morning to get together with the instructors and other students, and gather the necessary gear before heading down to the Rappahannock Quarry.

Rappahannock Quarry is located near highway 95, but not accessible via 95 directly. Instead you must drive down a dirt road, which for us was part of the adventure. We were driving a Civic, and the road was a bit muddy with some large size puddling going on. We almost chickened out but after some discussion, decided to take a chance and drive through rather than pulling over and transferring gear to another vehicle.

The Quarry is property of Fredericksburg, but operated by the Virginia Outdoor Center (Friends of the Rappahannock). It is about 40 feet deep at the maximum, with not much to see. Good thing, as you really can't see very far anyway. Still, you can get yourself below the surface, so why not dive it.

One of the reasons a person may not want to dive it might be the water temperature. To get a good picture in your head, the air temperature for our dive was 48 degrees, surface water temperature was 42 degrees, and at around 28 feet it was 38 degrees. Granted it is February, so it probably warms up some time in August. Even knowing it was gonne be cold, Liesl and I thought it might be fun to get into the water. Luckily, dry suits are made for this.

Liesl was using the instructor's Pinnacle suit, which turned out to be just a tad small on her, making it a bit difficult to get into and restricting blood flow to her fingers a bit. I was using a DUI suit from the shop. Contrary to my previous thoughts, a large suit was about as small as I could go given the added insulation. Despite the insulation and the dry suit, some parts of you are semi-exposed. Your feet are in dry booties, your hands in rubber gloves, but your head get stuck in a wet suit hood. This means you feel the cool water through the suit but you're bodies not wet while your head is. The water gets into your face, down your neck, into your ears. The initial response makes it hard to breathe - it's C.O.L.D. - it caused some major gasping from Liesl.

After a bout of wiggling into our suits and getting gear set up, we headed into the water to check bouyance. We started with the same weight we had used in the pool, but we were extremely light. We headed back to shore and added a few pounds, then returned to check again.

Everything seemed ok at that point, though I felt well over weighted toward the legs. Down we went to take on our first dive and perform a couple of skills, mainly just hovering and control. I found once I was down that having 14 pounds on your lower body pretty much guarantees you are not hovering properly. with some trial and error we were able to stay down long enough to knock it out. By this time my feet were pretty cold and frankly I was tired of fighting the weight distribution. We finished that dive, surfaced and spent some time on the shore. After being in the frigid water, it felt beautiful up top. Strangely I never really felt cold under water, more like you just knew it was cold and could tell it was cold through the suit, but we weren't down long enough for it to affect me very much. It helped that we had home made chocolate chip cookies to keep us well fed.

The second dive was not much better for me. I was struggling with maintaining buoyancy the whole time. It didn't help that my cylinder was getting low, so I was getting lighter. At one point I was trying to get rid of excess air in my legs, and ended up snagging my regulator half way out of my mouth. Not pleasant and it took a few seconds to get it back in and cleared. Liesl didn't seem to have half as many problems the second time around.

All around it wasn't really a fun or pleasurable dive experience. While that may translate to not wanting to dry suit dive for some people, it really means I just need more practice.