Neoprene gloves in frigid water, air and wind.

This is another post I had made to the Facebook group Inland Seas, Paddling the Great Lakes:


As a bit of a follow-up to yesterday's post on wetsuits in cold water...

The guides are finding that their hands are the hardest thing to keep warm. Their hands are always getting wet due to strokes, spray and the exercises we are performing. Wet hands get colder when the wind causes evaporative cooling to act on them. They and I are finding that neoprene gloves can often be worse than no gloves at all in those conditions, especially when the sun is out. On the days when the high gets into the 50's it isn't so bad. On days when the highs are in the low 40's or high 30's the only real solution is to keep your hands dry, except that we are kayaking...

I have neoprene gloves which don't have an outer nylon layer so they are smooth and they shed water quickly and it doesn't get to evaproate off. I have several pair and have been loaning them out. The company has neoprene gloves with an outer woven nylon layer which holds water. Yesterday about half of the students were paddling without gloves and tucking their hands into their PFDs to warm them during breaks even though they had gloves available. There is just no way to warm your hands when they are in cold wet gloves in the wind!

Some observations using wetsuits in frigid water, air and wind.

This is a post I originally posted on the Facebook group Inland Seas, Kayaking the Great Lakes:

Hopefully this information is interesting and useful. Keep in mind that everyone's thermostat is different and what works for one person in a certain temperature environment may not work well for the person next to them.

As you have seen from my recent post(s) I am currently training guides for the summer season of guiding on Lake Superior. We have had a cold spring and the lake is still quite cold. We have seen some form of ice each day on the beach we are launching from. In fact we had fresh ice this morning. The guides in training and I have done assisted and self rescues Tues, Wed and Friday this week. I do more swimming/demonstration than they do (by design) since they are in wet suits and I have a dry suit.

They are doing quite well with wet suits with poly base layers underneath and a fleece over the wet suit and a spray jacket over that. The big complaints are hands and feet and ice cream headaches on those occasions where their heads (or mine) get underwater. We try not to get our heads wet except the first day when a wet exit was required.

I am wearing a dry suit with a light wool/synthetic blend top and bottom as insulation and a fleece shirt and heavy wool socks. Surprisingly even being in the water to demonstrate all the rescues before they got to pick one to try (maybe about 20 minutes) I was ok, with my feet and hands getting coldest. I would have thought that the light base layer on the bottom would be way insufficient. I think that the feet getting cold is a combination of two things. They are in water in the bottom of the kayak after self rescues and the neoprene booties over the dry suit are probably compressing the wool socks too much.

For those of you who say a wetsuit is inappropriate for this environment, yes, it probably is, by itself, but it can be augmented to work. Would they want to be in the water for more than about 5 minutes or so? No! But that is why I damper down other risks (waves and such) on cold water/weather days. The cold in itself adds the risk back.