Diving Vanuatu

You descend to 10 meters, and you can feel the unexpected urge. You cannot hold it.

And there is no way you can get to a toilet without spoiling the entire dive. So you consider if I am in the water, my pee will just dissipate and vanish. Is it OK to PEE in the wet suit? The easy answer’s yes. Take a leak. Many of us don’t understand that pee unlike feces – is sterile, unless you’ve got a urinary tract infection. It contains lots of melted bodily waste (principally nitrates), but poses no health risk to you. The sole symptom of wet suit weeing is brief warm sensation in your vicinity. But beware, if your pee is dark and strongly odorous as well you might get a reaction from other divers, particularly if they happen to swim through your yellowish cloud of warmth. As a frequent diver, your best method for dealing with this common situation is counterproductive: drink more water.

You have certainly spotted the difference between your morning urine and your urine after (or during) a long night of drinking. Dehydration is common, especially in the tropics, yet minimal dehydration is endured and goes unobserved by the majority if the symptoms are reasonably mild. If you are correctly hydrated, your pee is clear and odorless. A diver worried about being detected should drink masses of liquids the night before and the morning of a dive, to guarantee satisfactory hydration and not being discovered in a plume of discolored water as he or she dives.

You could notice that though you relieved yourself before the dive, you want to go again when you get down to 10 or 15meters. Why would you need to urine again? You could be experiencing a phenomenon called immersion dieresis: as your body responds to a rise in pressure, your body feels compressed and your kidneys begin to produce pee.

If you are a habitual wet suit wee-er you must make sure you wash your wetsuit after each dive, you don’t need the additional worry of being detected by the odor from your underwater pee. An unrinsed wet suit develops its wonderful smell that will have you sitting on your own on the dive boat on the way to or from the dive site.

Tinkle away!