Here’s the bummer of it all. It’s not nearly as complicated, or differentiated, as we would all have you think.

The "it" I refer to is the plethora of wetsuit features, proprietary rubber (there’s precious little of that), panels, surfaces, and so forth. The "we" I refer to is that sub-group of capitalists called "triathlon wetsuit manufacturers."

The "bummer" I refer to is the fact that all these wetsuits are a lot more like each other than they are different from each other, and as a result you the consumer have neither the pleasure nor the confidence in the knowledge that you’ve ferreted out information that your fellow competitor hasn’t, thus giving you a competitive advantage in equipment.

When the wetsuit hoopla started (most of the blame for which I’ll place on my own skinny shoulders), there was one rubber manufacturer who had the upper-end market: an American company called Rubatex.

But then one day I received a guest from Japan—one Tommy Yamamoto, president of Yamamoto Rubber Company of Osaka. He could make his rubber so the surface would be more resistant to water—i.e., would repel water; i.e., would glide through the water just a little faster than your garden-variety rubber. We at Quintana Roo did not buy this rubber from him right off because the quality control was spotty, sheet to sheet. (Rubber comes in sheets, usually 50 inches wide and either 80 or 120 inches long.)

It took two years for Yamamoto to get it right, and when they did we started putting this rubber into our wetsuits. In fact, we came out with a new line of suits we called "Hydrophobic" (hates water).

What’s the upshot of all this? Pretty much everybody uses Tommy’s rubber: Orca, Quintana Roo, Aquaman. If you’re a player, you use his rubber.

There is one alternative to this. The world’s biggest maker of blown rubber, Taiwan-based Sheico, was not comfortable with this rather smallish, specialty Japanese manufacturer stealing all their thunder. So they came up with a brand of rubber called "Glideskin." Certain wetsuit makers use this, and when that's the case we'll point it out.

Then there is the issue of jersey. This is the fabric that is adhered to the inside of the suit. You’ve got your run-of-the-mill jersey (literally), then you’ve got your jersey that stretches more, then there is the really ultra-stretchy jersey. Stretchy jersey is expensive. Some manufacturers put this jersey in the entire suit. Others put it in the arms and back—i.e., areas where the suit needs to stretch a lot. Sheico and Yamamoto make their rubber sheets with jersey of varying degrees of stretch. When you hear wetsuit manufacturers talk about the ability of the athlete to breathe better in their suits, or that the VO2 max increases, they are probably making some cryptic, roundabout reference to panels made with stretchable jersey in the torso area.

Finally, there are zippers. Some suits zip up, some zip down. QR has a "breakaway zipper."

And that pretty much covers it. Everything else is: Does it fit? Do they honor their warranties well? And so forth. We’ll wade through all the tradename obfuscation and feature hoopla, and we hope that when we’re done we’ll have given you a little bit more knowledge about one wetsuit versus the other than you might have had before.

AQUAMAN BIONIK
AQUAMAN PULSAR
ORCA
T1