The personal and professional website of Douglas Van Bossuyt
After the epic adventure in making it to Forked Meadow through the middle of the snowstorm, the next morning found us in a winter wonderland while we started to work on Thanksgiving dinner.
Meanwhile inside we were busy getting ready for dinner.
But outside it was quite a winter wonderland. And the epic amount of snow at the back of the house was starting to form an igloo!
What a magical winter wonderland!!
We had a challenging adventure in getting to Forked Meadow for thanksgiving. The state highway folks were enforcing 100% chains at Cressman’s so we put our square link boron alloy chains on the truck, dropped the air pressure down in the tires, locked the hubs, and had quite the adventure. The road to Shaver Lake was in decent shape with packed snow but once we turned onto Dinkey Creek Road it was 2+ feet of unplowed snow that we were pushing through. We dropped the truck into low range and went along at about 5 mph through the snow storm to make it in. At one point we encountered a truck that was abandoned in the middle of the road with no people around. It was under a big drift of snow.
Until the big snow blowers came through later that night or early the next morning, no one was getting in or out of the area except for us.
After Heather’s neck seal started leaking more and my wrist seals started leaking a little, we decided it was time to upgrade our drysuits. But rather than get all new drysuits, we instead upgraded the seals. In my case I went from neoprene seals (which I really loved for the last decade) and in Heather’s case she went from fixed latex seals to SI Tech SLÄGGÖ Flex Ring wrist systems and ORUST Neck Systems. That allows us to field change seals if they tear. We went with silicone seals as the new setups on our drysuits.
I also replaced the zippers on my drysuit and redid the seams while I was at it.
Hopefully this will give us several more years of use out of these drysuits before it’s time to hang them up for good and get new drysuits. The crushed neoprene drysuits we have really handle the conditions in Monterey and further north quite well but it’s getting hard to find that style of suit anymore.
It turns out Nalgene bottles are almost the perfect size to work with the wrist seal system for installation.
Working on my drysuit. It requires cutting away quite a bit of neoprene to fit the ring onto the suit. That can be a bit nerve-wracking.
Doing Heather’s drysuit. The little clips are somewhat easy to break on the neck ring. It’s a good idea to get some spares to have handy because it can take a while to get new ones. I had to order those in from a seller in Estonia.
Doing both zippers on my suit. While the relief zipper was still in good shape, the back zipper was pretty much toast. I probably could have had it survive another 50 dives but it felt like this was a good time to do everything.
Re-sealing all the seams in my drysuit. I tried using the seam tape but it didn’t work very well with the suit material. I ended up using auqa seal flex to reinforce everything. Should be good to go now for a few more years.