Kokatat GMER Dry Suit First Impressions

Kokatat Gore-Tex Meridian Dry Suit with Relief Zipper (GMER) – First Impressions

I’ve always thought about owning a dry suit since I started paddling. I would think, “how sweet would that be!” Yet, I’ve always found my Kokatat Blast semi-dry top and Surfskin Pants (both of which are awesome by the way) to be sufficient for almost everything I’ve paddled so far in California. Then I decided to join some friends for a week of sea kayaking in Chile during the Southern Hemisphere’s early Spring. I knew my Blast and Surfskin was no longer going to cut it. For a while I debated about going the cheaper route with a Kokatat Rogue dry top and maybe a Tempest dry pant (almost half the price) over the GMER dry suit. What finally made me bite the bullet was a call to Kokatat and finding out they had a radish GMER in my size in stock, instead of having to wait the six weeks I was originally quoted for the radish color. I placed my order on a Tuesday afternoon and literally 48-hours later I was unboxing my very own bright red Gore-Tex dry suit at my local dealer.

The first thing to stand out was simply the color. Now, my Blast is also radish red, so I knew the color is what I wanted.  However, not having seen a full dry suit in radish in person I was a little concerned it would be overwhelming. It is… a little bit. There is simply a lot of fabric so there is a lot of red. Fortunately, there is enough black to provide solid contrast and with a mango or black PFD to balance it out, it looks great. At least I think it does. If that doesn’t suit your fancy, Kokatat will gladly custom make you a dry suit using any of their available colors. At the time of this writing that includes: mango yellow, radish red, cobalt blue, berry, and black. So you could have a mango top with cobalt legs or a berry top with black legs, it would be up to your imagination.

Having already tried on a large GMER in the store, I knew a large is the size I needed; and this corresponded correctly with Kokatat’s size chart. At 5’ 11” and 190 lbs it really is a good fit. The pants section could be a bit trimmer I guess, but I hardly notice the bagginess. My feet on the other hand have a bathtub of Gore-Tex surrounding them. The socks are sized to fit up to a size 11 foot, but my size 10 has about an inch/inch and a half of extra space to the toe when my heel is all the way back. It’s not horrendously big, but putting on snug kayaking booties will take some practice to make sure there are no uncomfortable folds. The waist, torso and arms feel just about right. The wrist gaskets will fit me just fine the more they stretch out from wearing the dry suit, but the neck gasket is chokingly tight at the moment; I’ll talk about that in another post though. I found the zippers to be a bit stiff, both in terms of zipping action and in my right shoulder where I really notice the zipper when fully rotating my arm. The action should get smoother the more I use the dry suit and shoulder should become more comfortable as I become accustomed to it. Even if they don’t, considering how watertight these zippers need to be I’m not really complaining. The chest pocket seems like a nice bonus, but I’m not sure how useful it will be when I’m wearing a PFD. Only extended use will tell.

Overall, I think this dry suit looks and feels amazing and I’m more than excited to go out and put it to the test. Look for a review after I get back from Chile.

More photos available on Flickr.