The C Bear 250gm Thinsulate Undersuit by Geraint Ffoulkes-Jones

The C Bear 250gm Thinsulate Undersuit in use by Geraint Ffoulkes-Jones Starfish Enterprise
General Use
My routine summer season's diving activities are in the 55-85 m range in various parts of the English Channel which typically involve in-water times of between 90 and 180 minutes depending on the depth and location of the wreck we are looking at. Since I'm not partial to the cold I use a C Bear 250gm Thinsulate Undersuit under my custom O'Three RI200 front entry compressed neoprene drysuit. Although I am only 5'10" tall I use the X-Large Undersuit as this gives me plenty of room to move inside and offers no resistance to any of my movements, such as reaching behind my head to the isolation valves on my twin-set. This side effect of this freedom is a slightly baggy fit, but my C Bear is still extremely comfortable and does not retain air in any part of my suit which would cause buoyancy problems I am a strong believer on not carrying anything unnecessary, as we have to carry more than enough equipment anyway. An Argon cylinder falls very much into this category - why carry a 5th or 6th another bottle of something that can't even be breathed ! Generally we fill our suits with our helium rich bottom gas during say the first 30-40 minutes an then flush our dry suits with nitrox when we swap off our bottom gas at about our 30 metre decompression stop. The C Bear and O'Three combination guarantees warmth through all portions of the dive despite using less thermally efficient gasses in the suit.		Britannic 98 Expedition In September 1998 I was a lead diver on a Starfish Enterprise expedition to dive the wreck of the HMHS Britannic the larger sister ship of the Titanic. The Britannic lies in 119m of water in the Aegean some 40 miles south east of Athens. She is probably the largest and most intact diveable liner in the world and lies on her starboard side. The shallowest part is the port rail at 90 m and our average dive depths were in the region of 110m. Due to the extreme depths our in water dive times were between 3½ and 5 hours for bottom times on the wreck of between 20 and 28 minutes. Although the water temperature in the Aegean is very warm in September, a 5 hour dive gives plenty of time for the chill to set in. Due to the wreck of the Britannic lying in a major shipping lane we had obtained an exclusion zone with the local Greek port control, but this also meant that we had to stay on site. Our decompression station was tied to the main shotline to the wreck and we used Jon lines to stay attached to our weighted downlines, which carried our last two bottles of staged decompression gas. Wind induced currents are common in the Aegean and on some days the surface currents were in excess of 2 knots. Fortunately these currents lessened with depth and disappeared by about 50m. However, these currents were strong on our shallowest (9, 6 and 3m) stops, which were also our longest (typically the last 2 hours of the dive).