beerbaron said:
Woffen, why do those dry-suits have little valves on 'em?
When you're under say 10, 20, 30, 40... meters of water or more (5 bars for 40 meters), you need to inflate air in your dry suit to avoid water entering in it by capillarity and also to keep some balance. This air is "decompressed" at 5 bars. When you go up, it inflates and as such takes more space (twice the space when you'll be at 2.5 bars), leading also to a quicker upward move which is not a good advise when coming back from a deep dive. The valves allow this surplus of air volume to be eliminated. Either willingly by pressing the left arm valve, either "automatically" by this left arm valve that you may close or open to different levels according to your needs. I put automatically under "" because you need in fact move a bit your left arm to evacuate the air. Altough in urgent cases, the air will find quickly his way out. Some dry suits may have an additional valve.
The "funny" thing about n00bs using this kind of suit is when they got air trapped in their feet and can't return themselves up (no valves in the feet). They just look like pathetic helpless balloons making deseperate moves to recover balance.
(Thank God these n00bs are generally in shallow waters)