SSI Dry Suit Diving

The SSI Dry Suit Diving course at Dive Rutland is priced at £250 and is one of the more practical specialities on offer for UK-based divers. Diving UK inland sites and coastline year-round without a drysuit is uncomfortable at best; for cold-water trips like Scapa Flow (on the Dive Rutland calendar for August 2027) it's non-negotiable.

The centre stocks and services drysuits from brands including Santi, DynamicNord, and Avatar — brands featured in their own comparison guides for UK cold water conditions. So there's in-house knowledge of how the suits actually perform, not just textbook instruction. Equipment hire is available for those not yet owning their own.

There's also a combined Dry Suit Diving and Navigation package at £330, which makes sense if you're doing both specialities anyway and saves against booking separately. Pool time at the centre is used to build initial comfort before heading to open water.

For divers planning to progress toward the SSI XR extended range courses, drysuit competency is effectively a prerequisite for the kind of cold-water, multi-dive technical sessions those programmes involve.