How To Look After A Wetsuit (And Everything Else You Left In The Boot)

Surfing does not destroy your kit. Surfing is the easy bit. What destroys your kit is the twenty minutes after you take it off, and the four days it then spends in a black bag in the boot of a car parked in the sun outside your work.

Almost every piece of cold water gear that dies early in this country dies the same way. Not torn on a reef. Not blown out by a hold-down. Rotted, cracked, stretched or delaminated because somebody was cold and in a hurry and dealt with it later. Later never came.

Here is what actually matters, in the order it matters.

The wetsuit

A 4/3 is the single most expensive thing most UK surfers own, and the most abused. Three or four habits will roughly double how long it lasts.

Rinse it in cold fresh water. Never hot. This is the one people get wrong because hot water feels like the kind thing to do after a winter surf. It is not. Heat is what breaks neoprene down — it degrades the cell structure and accelerates the glue failure at the seams. Warm-ish for the rinse if you must, cold is better, hot is how you get a suit that goes baggy and starts leaking at the shoulders in its second winter. If you pour a flask of hot water down your suit at the car — and most of us have — rinse it properly at home afterwards.

Dry it inside out, out of the sun. UV is the second killer. A suit hung on a south-facing fence in August is being cooked. Turn it inside out first so the lining dries, then turn it back and let the outside dry. Somewhere shaded with moving air beats somewhere warm and still every time. A garage, a porch, the north side of the house.

Use a wide hanger. Hanging a soaking suit by the shoulders on a thin wire hanger puts every kilo of retained water through two narrow points of neoprene. Over a season that is visible. Fold it over a thick bar, or use one of the proper wide plastic wetsuit hangers, which cost about the same as a pint and a half.

Do not store it wet. Ever. A wet suit rolled into a bag is a warm, dark, salty environment with a food source. It will smell within two days and the smell never fully leaves. If it has already happened, a dedicated wetsuit wash will get most of it out; household detergent will not, and will strip what flexibility the neoprene has left.

Look after the zip. Rinse it, and once a month run a candle or a proper zip lube along the teeth. A seized back zip is a repair; a seized chest zip barrel is often a new suit.

Fix small tears immediately. A two-millimetre nick in the knee panel is a five-minute job with neoprene cement. Left alone for a month of flexing, it is a ten-centimetre split. Neoprene cement lives in the glovebox, not in the shed where you will not see it.

Boots, gloves and hood

These get the worst treatment and the least attention, and they are the pieces that decide whether a February session is bearable.

Rinse them inside out — the insides are where the salt and the bacteria sit. Boots in particular will hold half a litre of water in the toe if you let them, so turn them upside down. Dry them away from radiators; direct heat on a boot sole will separate the glue line faster than anything you do in the water.

Gloves stretch out if you hang them by one finger. Peg them at the cuff.

The board

Fix dings before the next surf, not before the next season. A pressure crack that takes on water gets heavier, and a waterlogged blank never really comes back. If you cannot do a proper repair that week, tape it and keep it out of the water, or use a cure kit properly — clean it, dry it, then fill it. Filling a wet ding just seals the water in.

Do not leave a board in a car in the sun. The inside of a hatchback in July gets hot enough to delaminate epoxy and lift a patch. Boards on roof racks in traffic are fine; boards in a black car in a car park for six hours are not. If it is unavoidable, a reflective bag genuinely helps.

Check the leash. Specifically the rail saver and the swivel. Leashes fail at the joints, and they fail on the day you need them. A leash is about fifteen quid and a long swim is free.

Use cold water wax, and strip it once a season. Old wax goes grey, holds grit and stops gripping. Sun-warm the board slightly, scrape it, clean the residue, re-base. Twenty minutes for a board you can actually stand on.

Robes, towels and the rest of the bag

Changing robes and towelling do one job — pulling water off you fast — and one thing stops them doing it.

No fabric conditioner. Conditioner works by coating fibres, and a coated fibre does not absorb. A robe washed with softener a handful of times becomes a coat that keeps the wind off and leaves you wet underneath, which is exactly the opposite of the point. Wash it on its own, warm, no softener, and if it has gone non-absorbent already a wash with a cup of white vinegar and no detergent will usually strip the coating back off.

Do not hot tumble it. Heat shrinks the towelling loops and, on anything with a waterproof outer, degrades the coating. Low heat or a line.

And empty the bag. Every time. A wet towel left on top of a dry hoodie means two wet things and a bag that smells like a rockpool by Wednesday.

Our own kit, since you are here

SVRF hoods and tees are heavy cotton with a DTF print, and they want the same treatment as anything else printed: wash them inside out, cold, and keep them out of a hot tumble dryer. Cold wash protects the print and stops the cotton shrinking; inside out means the print is not being abraded against the drum for forty minutes. They are built to be worn over a damp body in a car park, so they will take a lot — but heat is what kills a print, exactly like it kills neoprene.

The honest bit

Nobody does all of this every single time. We do not. There are sessions where the suit goes in the boot wet because it is dark and it is raining and you have to be somewhere.

The trick is not perfection, it is the twenty-minute rule: whatever comes off your body gets rinsed and hung within twenty minutes of getting home, before you sit down. Once you sit down it is not happening. Everything else on this list is a bonus.

Kit that is looked after is kit you will use again on Thursday. That is the whole argument.