Sunday, March 31, 2013

Easter Sunday Dive

Today's dive ended with a whimper rather than a bang.

There was still plenty of ice on the lake but it was easy to enter from the shore to get under the ice.



This morning I had assembled my gear and was waxing the zipper on the drysuit. That was when I found, right at the left shoulder, a hole in the zipper right by the teeth almost the size of my pinky fingernail.

That explained the leak during the last dive - it wasn't the glove seal but a hole at the shoulder that did me in.

So I came out anyways and we tried to seal the hole with gorilla tape. While gorilla tape does many impressive jobs, including taping and holding a watertight seal on neck seals, it does not, alas, work worth a darn on the zipper as I found out shortly into the dive.

It did slow the water intrusion down a fair bit but I started feeling it creep in from the shoulder and strain to soak my torso. As there's still plenty of ice in the lake, that was enough for me to turn the dive and follow the line back to the surface.

At least I wasn't totally soaked this time- just the shoulder down to the thighs and my socks were dry, as were both arms.





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