Wet ruination or remarkable convenience?
The debate over whether or not to let it go in your wetsuit has long raged quietly beneath the neoprene of many a surfer’s mind. Cold water surfers know well the warming value of a good whiz, but anyone can relate to the revulsion of being encased in a thin layer of your own urine. There are other concerns too: “I’ve heard that mammal urine attracts sharks,” stated one young grom interviewed for this article.
“Yeah,” piped in his friend, “and that it ruins your wetsuit and makes fungus grow on your skin.”
“I’ve heard it gives you cancer,” wisely remarked another brat.
So do you really paddle in to shore just to take a leak?
“No,” they all agreed. “Everybody pees in their suits.”
Perhaps, instead of asking Junior High schoolers, it would be better to consult with experts on this matter. “Healthy urine,” according to Surfer magazine’s Surf Doc, Dr. Geoff, “contains no germs, and its most prominent ingredient - urea – is commonly used in skin care products. Urine does contain ammonia, and can burn the skin if in direct contact for long periods of time (as in a baby’s diaper), but that shouldn’t be problem in the surf.” As far as your health is concerned, there doesn’t seem to be much peril in taking a nice, discrete urine bath on cold winter swell.
While urine doesn’t seem to do any damage to the wetsuit itself, surfers who fail to wash out their wetsuit after every surf-n-pee session may begin to notice a rank, rotting smell. With all of its dark, wet nooks, urine soaked neoprene makes for a perfect fungus farm. In addition to a funky odor and greasy texture, this fungus has been known to cause skin irritation, allergic reactions, and infections in open cuts. And it’s nasty. The Surfer’s Medical Association holds that urine can cause “wetsuit folliculitis,” a skin condition similar to acne. This can all be easily avoided by washing your wetsuit off with fresh water after every time you surf, which also serves to preserve the lifetime of your suit in general. As far as attracting sharks goes, there is little evidence that suggests mammal urine attracts sharks, and if it did, you’d probably have to be eating a hell of a lot of sushi for your pee to be at all similar to that of a seal. One could also theorize that urine could act as a shark repellent. Someone could package it up and sell the stuff like sunscreen: shark repellent.
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