6 mm too much?

[adameborg]

Hi I will be freediving in 14-16 degree water. The wetsuit have bought is 6 mm. I've gotten some responses saying that it is too thick and will become very heavy in deep water. What do you guys think?

 

[cdavis]

Way too much warmth and bouyancy, a 5 mil would be plenty and big divers can do with less. Being from Sweden, I'll assume you know how much to weight, but, yes, you will be very heavy in deep water, say 80 ft or more.

Maybe borrow a pair of 3 mil pants?.

 

[adameborg]

Way too much warmth and bouyancy, a 5 mil would be plenty and big divers can do with less. Being from Sweden, I'll assume you know how much to weight, but, yes, you will be very heavy in deep water, say 80 ft or more.

Maybe borrow a pair of 3 mil pants?.

Alright, thanks for the response. I can still return the suit and get my money back. So I'll probably look for a 5 mil suit. We probably won't dive deeper than 80 feet so that seems like it would be fine.

 

[Bill McIntyre]

I'm going to disagree with the advice of others. 15c equals 59f if I have it right, and I wear a 7 mm suit in Southern California when the water is that cold. Many other divers do too. I don't wear my 5mm until the temp is up to around 61 or 62.

 

[cdavis]

Bills knowledge is hard to argue with. But, for me, it raises all the complications that don't get talked about much. How skinny are you? Big, thick divers can stay in cold water much longer. A custom suit makes a huge difference if your body type is not average. Smooth skin out is way warmer than nylon out after you get out of the water. The amount of exercise while diving, depth, time for each diving session, air temp, etc all make a big difference. Makes it hard to address suit thickness without knowing the conditions it will be used in. A few examples: I dive in 70 degree water with a 3 mil custom, nylon out, with vest. A twenty degree difference in air temp (winter vs summer) cuts my comfortable dive time by 10-15 per cent. Until the suit drys, I get much colder after I get out of the water. My 70 degree water diving is extremely low exercise, mostly sitting still between dives. After a little less than 2 hours, I'm cold. For comparision, last dive I was with a big(not fat) guy from Canada. He was hot in less suit than I had. Change that up and swim around a lot and I'd be toasty too, can stay in that temp water roughly twice as long. My cold water diving ( 7-8c) was done with a custom 6 mil open cel in, smooth skin out, with vest and 1mil short pants (rough equivaltent of a 7 mil), fairly energetic diving, 20-70 ft. 45 minutes was toasty and an hour+ was possible, but I got deep down cold. I was warmer once out of the water.

How all this interacts is very individual and hard to give advice on.

 

[Bill McIntyre]

Great points! There are so many variables. Some wet suits fit better than others, some of us are fatter than others.

In Southern California a lot of us spend a lot of time moving very slowly or even sitting motionless in kelp beds hunting white sea bass. In fact as I get colder, I find myself swimming more and faster trying to generate some heat. If I had been swimming that way from the start, I probably could have used a thinner suit.

And at age 78, I don't dive very deep. A thick suit is certainly more of a problem trying to come up from 80 feet than it is from 30 feet. On the other hand, you are working a lot harder making deep dives so that should generate more heat. But on the other other hand its probably a lot colder down there below a thermocline.

So many variables.

 

[adameborg]

Thank you for all the responses! We decided to stick with the 6 mil suits and found that they were perfect temperature-wise for the cold water of the Atlantic. Although a bit clunky and very buoyant, we like them for the diving we are doing right now at depths of ten meters. They may be annoying for deeper depths, but for now it's fine.