A Frank Guide To Diving Gear You Don’t Need
For diving you need at least a mask, fins, BC, regulator and a dive computer. But what else do you need? Board shorts. Don’t dive pants-less. But in general I believe that there is a lot of stuff you don’t need!
As usual, this is to be taken with a grain of humorous salt. I think I have some valid points I am making here, but I am not a fundamentalist in regards to any of them. If it makes you very happy to tie a rubber duck to your tank valve, please do so. If you are doing a type of dive where you believe that a tank banger is a necessity, please bring one. My recommendations what not to buy and bring underwater are meant for the typical recreational dive. My philosophy for diving gear often comes down to: Less is more.
Kim just smiles, and doesn’t bring nonsense underwater.
Rubber Ducky on Your Tank Valve
Let’s start with an easy one. Some people tie a little rubber duck, or rubber Hello Kitty, or a rubber octopus to their 1st stage. That then dangles around and looks thermonuclearly silly. Professional Christmas-tree-decoration designer who thought he had taken LSD for inspiration but really drank some bleach by accident level silly.
Don’t be these some people.
Tank Banger/Poking Stick
If you are a skilled diving instructor and use the stick for teaching/pointing, then it’s a good idea to bring one. But these are the minority of cases of tank banger owners and users.
I have witnessed the German instructor who hasn’t taught a scuba student in years, but tells everyone that he’s an instructor, and fuckwrestles the moray eel with the pointing stick he proudly brings on every dive. Pro tip: the moray eel doesn’t enjoy being German fuckwrestled.
I have witnessed the Korean dive group of 12, all of whom feverishly bang their tank pointers onto their tanks upon spotting “Nemo”. Anemonefish (“Nemo”) are in fact really common, so they are not a great reason to get overly excited. And, sound travels underwater much better than in air. Not everyone wanted to listen to their Nemo-inspired submarine cacophonic percussion performance.
And I have observed the dive guide who thinks he is the Watson to your underwater naturalist Sherlock by playing pool with every nudibranch he sees, with his pointing stick. Poor nudibranchs.
Again: Don’t be these people.
A Camera, If You Don’t Know How To Dive Really Well
The result of bringing a camera on your 8th dive, or on really any dive if you haven’t mastered buoyancy, is a lose-lose-lose situation: You will enjoy your dive less, you won’t take any good photographs, and you might break corals or sponges. And, yes, you might be an annoyance to your dive buddies since you will have less situational awareness due to staring at your camera controls.
Buoyancy training/practice/mastery first, underwater photography later. Important point!
Below: dude doing science underwater. Without a drysuit, or even neoprene on his legs. No rubber ducky and tank banger either.
A Very Thick Wetsuit
How thick is “very thick”? It depends on the kind of water temperatures you are diving in, and what sized person you are.
Where I live and dive, in the Dauin/Dumaguete area of the Philippines (Negros Island), the water temperature is between 27 to 29 C during most of the year. I have not worn a wetsuit in years. A rash guard is enough for me. Most of my friends in the area, who are smaller than me and hence cool down quicker, wear some kind of wetsuit, but usually 2/3 mm ones. No need to go thicker.
The point here is not to have a contest who can dive with the least neoprene, but to have as much as you need, not more, and not to increase your wetsuit thickness every few months. The human body’s brown fat cells, those which generate heat from fats, can be trained just like your biceps can be trained. If you neglect biceps or brown fat cells, their performance will suffer. If you keep wearing thicker and thicker wetsuits while the water is near baby-bath warm, your body’s heat generation capacity will decline. A simple case of adaptation. Giving in to the slightest discomfort of feeling cold, and increasing the wetsuit thickness will only make you feel cold again, once you have lost more thermogenic capacity, in a few months. I have met people who dive with a 7 mm wetsuit in Hawaii, and still complain that they are cold.
And again, don’t be these people.
A Drysuit in the Tropics
The fittest guy I have ever met got hurt in a drysuit at the start of a dive (which then didn’t happen) in sub-tropical waters. The guy is Mr. Crossfit, an avid hiker, jacked with very low body fat. He’s the kind of guy who would jog 5 kms to the pub, where everyone else would take a car or the bus. And he’d be less out of breath than anyone else when he gets there. He slipped and fell wearing his drysuit with integrated booties during a shore entry over some rocks, breaking one of his lower leg bones. Very unfortunately, that kept him from diving for many weeks.
I regularly do ~80 minute photo dives with only a rash guard in the Philippines, and have done 90 minute decompression dives with a rash guard and tech shorts (those neoprene shorts with pockets). I wasn’t trying to prove a point. I simply wasn’t cold. Even if you are not as heat-generating as I am, a thin wetsuit generally works well. See the point above.
Obviously, if you are diving in the North Sea, off British Columbia, or in Antarctic waters, you need a drysuit. If you do spectacularly extreme dives in the tropics (like a 3 hour scooter marathon on a rebreather), and you are a small, skinny person who easily cools down, you miiight need one too. In the vast majority of tropical dives, I doubt that you need a drysuit. Besides not being necessary for your heat budget, there are easier ways to achieve redundant buoyancy as well, if that is your concern during a tech dive. I can’t deny that I get the impression that the motivation for drysuit diving in places like the Philippines and Indonesia is to look bad-ass.