LET'S FACE IT, drysuits never stay completely dry inside. Even the best suffer the occasional accidental flood. Even when there are no minor punctures, the seals don't leak and the dump valve only lets air out and not water in.
After a dive, the inside of a suit will be clammy from condensation. Put it away like this, and a week later when you get it out for the next dive it will be minging.
Of course, some delicately hygienic divers wash and shampoo the inside of their drysuits after every trip - which guarantees that it will be thoroughly wet.
The moral is, after a diving trip when drying everything for storage, it is just as necessary
to dry the inside of a drysuit as it is to dry the outside.
The outside is easy; just hang it up and let the air circulate. But what are the options for drying the inside?
INSIDE-OUT
The most obvious option is to hang the suit up to dry the outside first. Then, to dry the inside, you simply turn the whole suit inside-out. You need to take care not to damage the zip in the process, but overall this tried and tested technique works well - except for the boots.
Unless your drysuit has socks that turn completely inside-out, most drysuit boots will turn only part way inside-out. If you have taken the option of heavy-duty boots, they won't turn inside-out at all.
What we are really looking for is a way of getting the inside of drysuit boots thoroughly dry and, while we're at it, any improvement for drying the rest of the suit.
NEWSPAPER
When I was a nipper my Grandad showed me how to get the inside of my wellies dry. You stuff them with newspaper, then, when the paper has absorbed as much water as it can, you replace it with more dry newspaper and keep going.
This old technique works equally well on drysuit boots, but perhaps doesn't get that last touch of clamminess out of them. Best of all, old newspaper is free.
DAMPIRE DRYZONE
These bags of moisture-munching granules can be stuffed into the boots of a drysuit to suck the moisture out of the lining. They are the modern hi-tech equivalent of scrunched-up balls of newspaper, and work much more efficiently.
After use, the granules can be regenerated simply by hanging the bags in dry air, or putting them in the microwave for a couple of minutes. The boot-drying version costs about £20 for a pair and should not be confused with the cheaper shoe-drying version, which doesn't have enough moisture-absorbing capacity.
Dryzone works most effectively if excess moisture has already been removed, so before using the drying bags a quick stuffing with newspaper or a wipe round with a dry towel will give you a headstart.
FAN THROUGH THE NECK
Simply hanging a drysuit on a coat-hanger is fine for drying the outside, ideally using a wide hanger or one with additional padding to avoid stressing the neck and shoulders of the suit. There are even special hangers marketed for drysuits, or the cheap option of adapting a length of drainpipe.
Among the proprietary diving-suit hangers is the HangAir Drying System, reviewed in DIVER Tests last December.
This is a wide contoured hanger with a built-in fan, so air is constantly circulating inside the suit and drying it right down to the boots, as long as there are no obstructions. The outside of the suit dries at the same time.
It's the sort of thing you would probably want to hang out of the way in a shed or garage, and costs about £35.
BY THE HEELS
Ignoring forced air circulation for now, an option that avoids stressing the neck and zip of a drysuit is to hang it up by the boots.
I have been to dive centres in Scandinavia with lines of pegs set in the wall at just the right separation to allow drysuit boots to slot between them and the suit to hang inverted.
Over a couple of hours in a drying-room, this method got the outside of a suit thoroughly dry, and the inside dry as far as the ankles. To dry the inside of the boots it was still necessary to turn the legs as far inside-out as possible. The pegs would then hold the suit up by the legs.
Overall, it was the drying-room that did the work, with little help from the pegs, though I always felt my suit was less likely to be damaged this way up than on a coat-hanger.
You don't need to set a line of pegs in the wall. For £6-12 various dive-kit suppliers sell drysuit-boot hangers, a pair of slots for the boots with a hook above to hang from a rail.
But don't expect to hang your suit inside a wardrobe, because the standard rail height will be too low for it to hang clear of the floor.
FANS, TUBES AND B&Q
As demonstrated by the HangAir hanger with fan, forced air circulation can dry your suit thoroughly, but we don't necessarily want to hang the suit up by the neck, and the place we want to direct the air circulation is into the feet.
A DIY solution is to build a suit-dryer out of PVC waste pipe. In its simplest form, this is just a pair of long tubes that stuff all the way along the suit to inside the feet, connected together with a box on the outside of the suit and a fan to push air through the pipes.
The ends of the pipes inside the feet need to be drilled with a few random holes so that they don't get blocked where they fit inside the feet. On the one I built I put some push-joints halfway along so that I can collapse it for storage.
I used a fan salvaged from a PC, so it runs from a 12V adapter or a car battery. At the end of a week's diving, with no opportunities to dry my suit out between dives, this gets the boots bone dry in an hour or two.
You don't need to stop there. Home-built drysuit dryers are not a new idea, and have been extended to provide additional air outlets to dry hoods, gloves and wetsuit boots.
A creative diver could have a wonderful time browsing the plumbing aisle at the DIY store.
For me, sitting at a keyboard writing this, I am now wondering about ducting the warm fan output from my PC and improving my "green" credentials.
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