Keep Warm Scuba Divers! PLUS Surf Fur Waterparka Review PLUS Exciting News From Jennifer Idol!.

It's early here. I'm just out walking zigs. Good morning. Uh, a cold snap has hit Florida. I know what you're thinking, Florida, the sunshine state, they probably don't have cold snaps. Actually we do. I'm not complaining. I don't mind the cold weather. Uh, but it has brought a lot of rough season that's canceled a lot of diving, but that's got me thinking about staying warm as a diver. And so I thought I'd call this video. Ladies and gentlemen, what's going on? Welcome to Divers Ready. My name's James. It is so wonderful to see all of your smiling faces. If you're new to this channel, consider to make your next dive on that subscribe button because here I make videos packed full of hints and tips for scuba divers with one simple goal in mind, and that is to help make you a better diver. Later in this video, I'm going to be giving you my top five tips, best practices, habits you should adopt for helping you stay warm as a diver. And whilst that might not make you necessarily a technically better diver, it's going to make your dives more comfortable. It's going to help you enjoy your dives more. And that's something that I'm very passionate about. I also have a new favorite piece of non dive gear to share with you. And also some very exciting news from Divers Ready friend and first woman to dive all 50 US states, Jennifer Idol. So stay tuned for that at the end of this video. Jennifer dived with me this week and was kind enough to take some professional profile shots of me, which are desperately needed because I don't have any recent photos. And I can't wait to see what she came up with. If they look even halfway decent, then I know that she's a master of Lightroom and Photoshop because let's be honest, I didn't really give her a lot to work with, but always a good time diving with Jennifer. Stay tuned for the exciting news at the end of this video. Look, I'll be the first to say it. Probably nobody wants advice on keeping warm from somebody who spends their winters in Florida. I get it. I understand. I really do. But you have to remember that I cut my teeth growing up diving in the English channel, year round diving. And I've also dived in both polar regions. So I do know a thing or two about cold water diving. I actually miss cold water diving a lot. It's something that I enjoy. It's a different discipline. Uh, you have to be more thoughtful. It's not, it's not as casual as tropical water diving. Uh, and I, and I miss it a lot and I look forward to cold water adventures whenever I still get the chance. And I've got some cracking ones coming up this year. As you'll hopefully remember from your open water dive training, uh, water conducts heat about 24 times faster than air does, which means anytime you're immersed in water that is colder than body temperature, your body has to burn calories and fight to maintain body temperature and keep you warm. Now here in South Florida, while star water is still considered tropical average temperatures throughout the year range from about 70 degrees Fahrenheit to 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Tropical barmy, yes, but still colder than body temperature, which means anytime you spend a lot of time immersed in that temperature water, your body still has to fight to maintain your core temperature. Even the best wetsuits in the world and the best dry suits don't promise a zero heat loss solution. So it's imperative that once you get out of the water, you get dry and reheat as quickly as possible. And people just don't realize that in the tropics. Why is beating the chore so important for scuba divers? Well, a lowering of body temperature by even a couple of degrees leads to hypothermia. Uh, but as well as that, there's actually negative effects that can happen to a diver during a dive from being cold. For example, being cold increases your susceptibility to narcosis and enhances the effects of narcosis and it increases your risk of decompression illness. So with that in mind, here are my top five tips for beating the chill on your next dive trip. So rule number one, it is better to be warmer while stationary than cooler while active. Well, what do I mean by that? There are two different parts of any kind of dive. There's active and inactive. Inactive parts of your dive include things like a drift dive where you're just kind of hanging there and drifting along and not using any kind of energy at all. And your safety stop, for example, where you're just hanging at one depth and chilling out. Active parts of your dive are where you're actually swimming. So if you're kicking, you're exercising, you're generating heat, out and back dive, swimming in current, those kinds of parts of the dive would be considered the active portions of your dive. So when you're picking your thermal protection for the dive itself, you want to make sure that you're warm enough on the inactive parts of the dive where you're not generating a lot of body heat and not doing a lot of exercise. If you're planning on doing a drift dive, you're probably not going to be doing as much finning as you would for an out and back style of dive. So you're going to want to factor that into your suit selection. If there's a likely thermocline, i.e. a shelf of water where it's colder at the bottom, you're going to need to plan your thermal insulation for the coldest part of your dive, obviously. Yeah. Sometimes here in South Florida, we have what's called a surprise thermocline. That's where you go out one day and you're perfectly warm and fine. So you get up in the same gear the next day, go out to a similar sort of spot. And as you descend down, you just pow right into a nice thermocline. Water temperature drops by like 20, 25 degrees and all of a sudden you're freezing. Surprise! Good times. I'm not a big fan of telling people what thickness wetsuits they should use, because I think everyone feels the cold differently and that's very subjective. But I do say that if you're trying to choose between, you know, diving in a skin or diving in a three mil or diving in a three mil and diving in a five mil or five mil seven, blah, blah, blah. And you kind of, you're on the fence. Always go with the warmer one. Tip number two is get that wetsuit off or at least cover it up. What do I mean by this? Wetsuits work great in the water. They trap water into the foam, the neoprene of the suit. Your body warms that water up and it gives you like a nice protective blanket while you're immersed. On the surface, different story. All that wetsuit is doing for you while you're sitting there shivering on the boat, it's holding cold water against your body and any breeze just amplifies that effect. So if it's the last dive of your day, get that wetsuit off. If you have a long break, like, you know, you're splitting for lunch or whatever, long surface interval, get that wetsuit off. If you just have a short surface interval before dives and the thought of putting that cold wet wetsuit back on again terrifies you, as it does me, by the way, I hate putting on a wet wetsuit. At least cover the wetsuit up. Put a protective layer on that's going to act as a windbreaker so that that wind isn't blowing on the cold water trapped against your body, which is going to amplify the chill factor. Get yourself a boat coat, something that you can throw over the wetsuit that's going to give you a windproof barrier and keep you warm. More on that later. Tip number three is beanie time. The myth that you lose 40 to 45% of your body heat through your head has been widely debunked. The surface area of your head accounts for about seven to 10% of your body's total surface area and you lose about seven to 10% of your body heat through that. It's basically a one to one ratio. There isn't a colder part of your body. So covering your head is only as important as covering any other part of your body unless you're wet. Now if you're lucky enough to be graced with long flowing, beautiful locks of hair, not a problem I've had any time recently, then you'll know that hair is very good at retaining water, which is why it's incredibly important to keep the wind off of your wet hair to prevent heat loss through your scalp. There comes a time in every man's life and mine is coming soon where you just have to man up and do the Bruce Willis. Grab yourself a beanie, put it on as soon as you can after the dive and that will both dry your hair and provide a barrier to the air. I'm a poet and I didn't even know it. No, never. Don't do that. Tip number four is get dry, get changed as quick as possible after the dive. Now here in South Florida it can be a 45 minute boat ride back in from the dive site to the dock, which means I could be waiting potentially up to 45 minutes before I have a restroom or toilet that I can go and get changed in. Most of the boats we dive from are very open and you know it's a mixed crowd. You don't want to be dropping your drawers in public. That's not, nobody, no, don't do that. So those 45 minutes in wet swim shorts and rash guard even with a slight breeze suck. So before recently I used to take like a large beach sheet that I could wrap myself in and awkwardly like pull down my wet shorts, put dry shorts on under it and preserve some kind of dignity. You know, think about surfers. The minute they're out of the water, they're back to the car, put the board down and get changed, get out of the wetsuit and get dry as quickly as possible. All I'm saying here is the sooner you get dry, the sooner your body stops fighting to keep you warm. Tip number five is take a hoodie with you on your dive trip. I can't stress this enough. You'd be surprised but having lived in the Caribbean and ran a dive center, I was used to doing four or five dives a day. How much use I got out of a simple hooded sweatshirt. It really is something you don't think about. You think I'm moving to the Caribbean, I'm just taking this pair of swim shorts and that's all I'm going to live in forever. It doesn't work that way. Even in the tropics, it's rare to dive in water that is warmer than body temperature. Multiple days of diving, multiple dives a day, it's really important to have something that you can throw on at the end of the day that's just going to help your body preserve your core temperature. Even if you just throw it on for five minutes after the dive until you feel good again, just whip it back off again. Honestly, pack a hoodie and especially if you're going on a liveable because what you're doing there is you're doing five or six dives a day and in between you're getting blasted with air conditioning. So you definitely want to make sure that you've got a nice warm piece of kit for maintaining body temperature between multiple dives. Now, luckily I found the perfect piece of non dive gear to add to my arsenal. This is the water parka from Surfer. Now I saw these guys at Dima a couple of years ago and was immediately enamored by their products and thought, yeah, I got to get myself one of those. And for reasons I can't recall now, I just didn't. But I immediately saw the logic in their design and I saw the practical application of it and I thought, huh, that's a really cool thing and I should get myself one of these. Now fast forward to just before Thanksgiving of last year and I went out on a dive that shocked the living hell out of me. Not because the water was unexpectedly cold. The water temperature was 78 degrees, but for some reason it decided to be 64 degrees air temperature in Florida in November. That just doesn't need to happen. The water was perfectly fine. I was in a three mil wetsuit. We executed the dive perfectly and it was nice and warm. And as soon as I pulled myself up the ladder, the wind hit me from the side and I think Florida has softened me. So this was my Black Friday Spurge. I did pay full retail price for it. Although, uh, as part of their Black Friday offer, I got a free dry bag, which has been very useful to keep it in. Uh, but other than that, this is not a sponsored review. Uh, and I've been using this article all winter and I wanted to tell you what I love about it. And it seemed logical to do so this video cause we're talking about keeping warm. The company Surfer, they're based out of California. They are founded by a couple of what they call water men because their logo is this cute little otter and I love otters. So that's the thing. Uh, no, they're founded by genuine surfers, water people, uh, who understand what you need to stay warm when you're spending your days on the water. Uh, and they make all the products in the USA. This is made in the USA. If that happens to be a thing that is important to you. Um, and what I really like about the product is what I call design accuracy. It does exactly what they say it's going to do. And that is in the case of the Surfer water parker, keep you warm from head to toe. And I can attest that to be true. But what I like about it is it's windproof, it's waterproof, and yet it is breathable. Um, they have a proprietary fleece material that's actually three layers and it lets your natural body condensation out because sitting in a puddle of your own sweat and being wrapped in a horrible nylon plastic bag, that's just nasty. Now as recommended, I ordered this in my t-shirt size. Uh, and as you can see, it's quite a generous cut. Um, and the reason for that is because it also doubles as the changing room you can wear. So now on a dive boat, instead of having to try to balance wrapping a towel and holding a towel around me with one hand and using the other hand to tug my wet shorts down and not expose my bare ass to the entire dive boat, I can simply throw this on and thanks to the pockets, which have a hole through the middle of them with my wet shorts down, pull my dry shorts up. Bob's your uncle. I'm dry. I'm warm. I'm happy. It saved me time at the other end and it saved me the wet boat ride in. This saves me time after the boat gets back to the dock and I don't have to go and use the facilities and change there. I can just get in my truck and head home, which I love. And if you're too lazy to get changed, this also doubles as a car seat cover so you don't mess up the seats in your truck. It's the car seat cover you can wear as well. You got nice big pockets here for your car keys. You got nice big pockets on the outside to keep your hands warm. Poppers for enclosures, snug as a bug in a rug without sweating yourself in your own boil in the bag plastic suit. Get yourselves one of these. I love it. I highly recommend it. Link in the description below. Thank you, please. Now on the subject of cooler weather diving and staying warm, I have some exciting news to share from our friend, Jennifer Idol. Jennifer, you'll remember from our video, an American diver was the first woman to dive all 50 States and she is an fellow. Uh, and she's put together a once in a lifetime unique dive trip, photography expedition, and just something that's out of the ordinary. If you like your dive trips to be a little bit challenging and a little bit off the beaten path and a little bit away from where all the crowds go. Plus maybe you're an underwater photographer or even an above water photographer who's looking to sharpen their skills and get hands on workshop style practical skill sessions from a professional published photographer. This is the trip for you. Jennifer has put together a very exciting above land and in the water expedition to Newfoundland, Canada. So the expedition which is going ahead in July of 2020 will be led by Jennifer herself. It's a small group trip. I think there's only something like 10 places. I don't know how many of those are still available. Um, so act fast if you want to get on that. But Jennifer will be there leading the trip herself and it's just your chance to hang out with somebody who I really admire and respect as a photographer and, uh, who undoubtedly will help you, uh, improve your skills. Anyone can dive with angelfish. When was the last time you dove with moose? Details of this once in a lifetime expedition are available on diversready.com through the link in the description of this video below. Uh, and that has all the booking and contact information you need. If you have more questions, you can reach out to Jennifer through that and ask her anything you want. Don't forget to tell her that Divers Ready sent you. It's going to be an amazing trip. So stay warm out there, friends. Don't forget to like this video. Give it the old thumbs up. Subscribe if you haven't. You know how it works by now. Just over here. I'll put some other videos you can watch if you want to. And let me know in the comments below, are you a cold water diver? And if so, what are your favorite tips for staying warm? Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, my name's James. This was your Divers Ready video for this week. Dive safe, dive often.