Dry Suit
Just so we are clear here. We do carry our dry suits and wear them if it is piss rain – best clothing to get into the forest through the grass and alder and set up a tarp – or if we are paddling in high seas. I’ll wear a paddle jacket (hooded) in normal rain and anything under three foot waves. However, 70% of the time the seas are flat when paddling the Inside Passage.
And I am sorry to have contributed to thread drift…
It can be, as mentioned in …
… the reply to this sub-topic just above. The uppers of Chota boots are neoprene (except for the Gore-Tex models), and they are very waterproof. They also don’t take on more than a smidgeon of water into the material itself (they don’t get “wringing wet” like a wetsuit or kayak booties). Neoprene is a material, not a method of construction, so I would guess that the open-cell foam structure of a wetsuit need not be the nature of all things made from neoprene. I won’t claim to know “how” neoprene can be waterproof though, only that I know it can be.