Title: Gloves : cold water necessity
Tags: suits gloves cold-water
Blog Entry: In my 27 years of teaching I've seen a few, let's call them "special" students. They come various varieties, and each with their own peculiarity. While reading the blogs & surveys I am reminded of a few of them. Here's one I'd like to share, I'll call him No-gloves. I live, work, dive & for 27 years taught diving in Ontario Canada. The Great Lakes are large bodies of fresh water that have deep thermoclines. In the summer the surface temp can be a nice 70°F, but 70 - 80 feet below, the temperature is a chilling 45° F. I wear a drysuit all year round for this reason. Shallow dives you can go gloveless or just wear thin reef or 3 mm gloves to protect yourself from the zebra mussles. On one of my Advance O/W courses I had one young student who hated wet suit gloves. He complained about not being able to feel his equipment, fumbling, dexterity probems and so on. The last two dives of my AOW's is on a charter boat, deep dive & wreck dive. Both are actually on wrecks, but the first is 110, ft & second much shallower. During the predive briefing of the deep dive we discuss depth, do air consumption calcs, establish turn points, general layout of wreck, location of down line etc. I make note of the depth of the thermocline being at about 70 ft, temperature is 45°F, recomend full hoods & gloves. Up pipes old no-gloves" do we have to wear gloves?, so I answer "Yes, I'm wearing gloves, & I suggest you do also." Well old no-gloves starts the dive with gloves on, but at about 50 feet on the way down the line I see him stopped, arm wraped around the mooring line, taking his wetsuit gloves off. "Well some people have to learn the hardway, I guess". I continue with my group of students, and escort them around the wreck & down to the deepest spot 110ft at the keel. We did hit the thermocline at 75 ft and were surprized as 3 large salmon cruised by at a fast clip, following the thermocline. We're making our way back towards the mooring line when I spot old No-gloves.I started to chuckle, water seaped inot my mask & and choked a little on it. Old no-gloves had one of his gloves back on, but the other hand, he had the sleeve of his wet suit pulled down over his hand, and he was grasping the mooring line with the sleeve. Apparenlty lost one glove!. At the 15 ft safety stop he had his hand out of the sleeve, but had left the other glove on. During the debriefing I couldn't resist, I had to bring up the thermocline and water temperature on the wreck. It was one of the other students who jabbed at "no-gloves" asking him about it. LOL Mike D
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