White Water Canoeing in Cold Water

Video Transcript

So we talked about dressing for the water temperature not just for the air temperature, one way to do that in real cold water is to wear either a neoprene wetsuit, which is going to really give you a lot of insulation, and this is a 3 millimeter wetsuit that has a 3 millimeter thick rubber foam, uh, that’ll keep some water trapped between the suit and your body, and that water will warm up and keep you pretty warm. These are great, they also give you a little bit of protection if you’re going to be swimming around in the river a lot because they are, they are padding and these, these actually have knee pads so they give you a little more protection then, than other types of wetsuits. These you notice don’t have arms, the reason they don’t have arms is because for paddlers generally we want to have our arms free to be able to move around, so a good way to deal with that is to wear a fleece on top of this and maybe a paddle jacket over the top of that. The ultimate in warmth is a dry, a dry suit, a full dry suit and full dry suits are not the most comfortable things in the world but they, when it’s really cold out, when the water temperature is really cold and the air temperature is really cold these are a great way to keep yourself warm and for, for safe paddling in really cold environments these are the best way to go. These have latex gaskets at the neck, at the wrists, somewhere down inside there, and they also have latex gaskets at the ankles. And they have a dry zipper, so when this zipper is zipped, it’s perfectly waterproof. Inside these dry suits you just stay almost entirely dry except for your own perspiration and some dry suits are also made in breathable fabrics so they’ll keep you almost perfectly dry. Underneath a dry suit you wear layers, you wear polypropylene, fleece, rasgards, things like that, that’ll give you insulation underneath because the dry suit doesn’t provide any insulation in itself.

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