The Best Gloves for Scuba Diving .

Ladies and gentlemen what's going on and welcome to Divers Ready. My name is James. It's so great to see all your smiling faces and welcome to this the next in our installment of videos that we call quick tips where I try and cram as much of my scuba diving knowledge about a particular topic into a video five minutes or less and in this installment I'm going to get handsy with you because we're going to be talking gloves for scuba diving. Let me preface this video by saying that my preference is always to be barehanded in the water whenever possible but there are two circumstances under which I choose to wear gloves and one is if I want to protect my hands from cuts and abrasions in the water and the second is if I think it's going to be cold and I want to protect my hands and thermally insulate them. Those are the only two reasons so what I'm going to do is walk you over to the table over there and I'll go through my decision making process as to whether or not to wear gloves and which gloves I choose. So while I'm setting the camera up over there you guys subscribe to our channel if you haven't done so already because we really appreciate your support. Okay I've got all the gloves here that I use for scuba diving let's have a look at the ones I use to protect my hands first and foremost. These gloves have no thermal insulation properties whatsoever they're purely there to stop my hands from getting cuts and abrasions. How would you cut your hands while scuba diving James? Well here in South Florida we have a lot of wrecks and I love diving them. Also you're allowed to fish on these shipwrecks so consequently the mooring lines that we use for ascent and descent are normally wrapped up with a lot of fishing tackle hooks in particular. In addition to that we also have razor clams which as the name suggests are incredibly sharp so as we're making our ascent and descent up and down the mooring lines I like to have my hands protected because those things will cut your fingers to shreds in no time at all. Now top tip for you if you're buying gloves to protect your hands do not go with a scuba branded product. There are a lot of gloves out there particularly with the spearfishing community that you can get that are that are nylon and they're nitrile dipped they've got the nice sort of hardened plastic protective coating on the inside. They're incredibly expensive they're 25-30 bucks a pair just because they've got a little scuba diving logo maybe a cute little hammerhead on the back of the hand. The exact same gloves are available at your local hardware store in the US for $5. These are the exact same gloves so you're going to save yourself about $20 or $30 a pair. I also use sort of more robust gloves that have knuckle protection and so on for wreck penetration. These are synthetic leather gloves again from the hardware store and again like under $10 a pair. So those are my choices for protecting my hands. To keep my hands warm you've got to go to neoprene and for neoprene I do absolutely prefer a dive brand because they're neoprene experts. So until recently I was using these gloves they're from scuba pro and they're three mil or they were. Don't forget the neoprene over time as it expands and contracts eventually you lose its thickness. So these were three mil gloves at one point in time they have a nice grippy handle and down here in Florida that's all I really need. I would always recommend that for gloves and booties you go with the thinnest gloves you can get away with so that you stay as dexterous as possible when it comes to using tools underwater like a reel, SMB, lights, cameras and so on. As you can see there these gloves are starting to wear out so I wanted to replace them as winter approaches here in Florida and the water temperature gets a little bit cooler and what I've decided to go with instead are these kind of hybrid gloves from Behr and this video is not sponsored by any other companies I'm mentioning here. These are a lot thinner but they promise the same warmth as three mil just neoprene gloves and they achieve that by a three layer design so you have a windproof shell on the outside which is actually supposed to be water repellent then you have a traditional neoprene on the inside which is doing the most of the warmth work there. Then the inside of them actually have a fleece lining which is very cozy just like their wetsuits you guys know I've been using Behr wetsuits for a long time so hopefully these achieve the same level of warmth but with more of a modern design they're a little bit thinner and again that thinner glove is going to help you when it comes to dexterity and using tools underwater. On that subject if you are intending to use gloves whether they be for protection or for warmth you might want to think about what you're going to be doing with your hands underwater for example bolt snaps quite often I'll use the smallest bolt snaps I can get away with which is usually a medium I have quite big hands but with gloves on that becomes more of a tricky task than it should be so sometimes for stage bottles in the winter I'll swap out the bolt snaps for a much bigger chunkier option and these are a lot easier to use with gloves on. Let's talk about where you should wear gloves a lot of destinations around the world are banning scuba divers from wearing gloves because it prevents idiot divers from touching coral and other marine life that they absolutely shouldn't be messing with and I fully fully support that some examples would be Key Largo, Bonaire, the Cayman Islands inside those places marine parks you're not allowed to wear gloves so my recommendation for all of you guys is to check with the destinations where you're heading to to dive to see if gloves are even allowed because that might help prevent you from packing unnecessary items. So there you have it ladies and gentlemen that is everything I consider about gloves when I'm going scuba diving I hope this video helped you if it did let us know in the comments below what other quick tips videos you'd like to see don't forget to subscribe to our channel if you haven't done so already and click that little notification bell so you don't miss any of our future content until next time my name's James this was your quick tips video for this week from Divers Ready dive safe dive often