It was 20 below and I went out and bought some chest waders and had my daughter bury me in the snow."

Bob Duncan, Alaska Airlines pilot and part-time inventor from Sequim, Wash. believes that a good theory needs a prac­tical test. So four years ago, after what he can only describe as a revelation, he set about testing the theory that his own breath could provide enough heat to savehim from hypothermia.

Duncan's first test was crude, but effective. Living in Anchorage at the time, he instructed his daughter to bury him waist-deep in the snow. Looking silly and acting crazy is a risk that many inventors must take.

"I took a hose and ran it down one leg and waited about seven minutes because I wanted to get a little chilly to see what would happen," he explained.

Once the chill set in, he began exhal­ing into the hose to see what effect it would have on his leg in the sealed hip boot.

"In 20 minutes my leg is toasty warm," he recalled, "and the rest of me is dying." Thrilled with the discovery and freezing cold, mostly, he dug out and ran inside to tell his wife Mary Jane.

"My wife - who actually has great patience with me - was on the phone saying, 'You're not going to believe what my husband is doing now... " he recalled."I pulled down my chest waders and long underwear and grabbed her hand. I put it right there," he said, pointing to one of his thigh muscles. "It was ice­cold... like duh.

"She was still just talking away ... Then I put it on my other leg, and it was warmer than it is right now. And she couldn't talk anymore. It was that shocking.

"That's when we realized there was something to this," he said.

The concept is easy to understand. The idea is to recapture the heat of human respiration by funneling one's breath back into a survival suit and slowing the body's chilling process. The breath we inhale is typically warmed by our lungs to about 88 degrees F before we exhale it. While we occasionally use our breath to warm our hands when they're chilly, most of the time we simply expel it - and the heat it carries-into the atmosphere.

Dumping heat in this fashion serves a healthy purpose when we're overheated. It cools our bod­ies from the inside out. But when we're struggling to stay

warm, breathing hard and immersed in cold water, the more we breathe, the more heat we lose from the cen­ter of our body. And once that heat vents into the atmosphere, there is no way to get it back.

Cold-water immersion is no joke. Losing heat from our body core through res­piration and from our skin by direct contact with cold water, our body begins to cool.

Then our core temperature drops below 95 degrees, we begin to shiver. When it drops below 90 degrees, we no longer have energy to shiver and we slip into a very critical condition of hypothermia. At this point, without careful handling and hospital treatment, there's a strong chance we'll never recover.

How fast we cool as individuals and how we respond to mild or moderate cooling is highly variable, but there's no doubt that slowing the cooling process is critical to survival when abandoning any vessel. Cold-water victims often die before they technically become hypo- thermic. Once they lose the ability to swim and keep their airway clear of water, they Can drown in a single breath.

before they technically become hypothermic. Once they lose the ability to swim and keep their airway clear of water, they Can drown in a single breath.

Duncan's first invention was a pillow to help passengers sleep in a cramped coach seat on a com- mercial airliner. But flying back and forth to Dutch Harbor, he became aware of a much more serious need from commercial fishermen work­ing the Bering Sea.

"You hear stories in Dutch Harbor that you don't hear anyplace else ... about the fatalities," Duncan said. "I think that kept me going."

From the crude success of his first chest-wader experiment, Duncan continued his low- tech develop-ment program, searching for a way to incorporate his device into an existing survival suit, or perhaps even build one himself.

At one point he spent 40 hours working tediously with a seaming iron to complete his homemade version. "It looked like something from outer space," he recalled with a chuckle. "And it leaked like a son of a gun.

"That was test Number 5 ... the shortest test. I walked into the water and I got right out. I went home and I ripped the thing up ... I was so mad at myself." It wasn't his only setback. "I had a huge failure down in Kodiak," he recalled. "I had a Coast Guard diver right next to me. It was going to be a grudge match ... and I had swiss cheese for a survival suit.

"They thought I was out to lunch any­way, and this kind of confirmed it. Water was coming in, I had to get out after an hour and a half. I was just freezing..." Fortunately Duncan found a small pocket of hope in the Kodiak failure.

"Air went down to my heel and worked its way up to my knee and stopped there... and that knee was toasty warm! And that was the only reason I kept going."

Where there was warmth, there was hope, and Duncan continued working on his air-delivery system, trying desperately to come up with a way to disperse his warm breath evenly throughout the suit. Eventually he developed a liner made from material similar to a plastic scrub­bing pad. Directed through a· diver's mouthpiece and flexible hose, his breath entered the liner at the small of his back and dispersed upward and 1aterally throughout the body of the suit. In addi­tion to providing dispersion, the mat-like surface of the liner shielded him from the cold shell of the suit itself and pro­tected him from contact cooling. Inflated by his warm breath, the suit also rode higher than normal, lifting his body higher in the water, which provided more "freeboard" and less submerged surface.

Duncan's breakthrough test came in Valdez: when he entered 48-degree water, the suit didn't leak and the re-cir­culating system appeared to be' working.

"I'd made it three hours and I was okay," Duncan recalled, "so I figured I'd go until it [body temperature] starts dropping off. I made it eight hours."

It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't bad. "I had a few cold spots that weren't protected below the water- line," he recalled, "but I could have kept going and I came out warmer than I went in."

Duncan was "jazzed" and figured he was a sure pick for some grant money that was available. So he taught himself how to write a proposal, cranked out a 20-pager and figured he was "a shoe-in."
He still keeps the response.

"In fact, it's been one of the most moti­vating things that I've had ... It said, 'You know, it's very good that you have these ideas, but here's a couple books that will show that you don't have quite enough education in this depart- ment... but please continue on with your ventures.'

"God, I was mad. I was thinking, 'Someday you're going to regret that.'''

Duncan knew he was onto something but as he put it, "I was convincing zero people... I had to take it to the next level."

He'd conducted the Valdez test in the summer of 2003. He knew a summer test wasn't enough to turn any heads so he went to Seward that winter. For a control test he first brought a "top of the line" name-brand survival suit to the Seward site and hopped into 38-degree water with the outside air temperature at 15 degrees.

Measuring his temperature with an ear therm- ometer, normal was 97 degrees. When his ear temp dropped to 94 an hour later, he ended the test.
"You're not dying at 94, you're just shivering," he explained, "but if we hit 94, we stop the testing." It didn't take long.

The next week he returned to Seward with the same suit fitted with his liner and re-circulating apparatus.

"With I5-knots of wind out of the north, I went five hours," he recalled. "Now we did not come out warmer than we went in. I went in at 97 and came out at 96.5. But the only reason I got out was that it was getting dark and we also had a sea lion come up and I didn't want him to get friendly with me."

As Duncan put it, "We thought we hit a home run there, and I was flying all the way home to Anchorage."

Despite Duncan's solid hit, it was still a long way around the bases. His product seemed to work, but nobody was jumping to manufacture it.

So he kept testing and demonstrat­ing his story. Last year he took his suit to Sitka and spent a full 12 hours in the water, observed by Jerry Dzugan, director of the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association.

He took his results to Washington D.C. and got a heartening response from Congressional staffers. He raised the eyebrows of government procurement officials, but they want­ed a finished suit, not a one-off proto­type.

Convinced of his product, but stymied by his inability to bring his dream to fruition, Duncan said, "I learned to be patient."

He approached several manu- facturers of suits currently available on the market, but they were not interested in retooling or investing in further development of his design.

Finally he hooked up with Whites Manufacturing of Saanichton, B.C. Already successful in the dive-gear market, Whites was developing its own "dry" version of a survival suit at the request of the Canadian Coast Guard. Duncan convinced them to give what he now calls his "Breathe 4 Life" liner system a shot, and they agreed to help him develop a more sophisticated prototype.

The first test in Victoria was a suc­cess for both products. The subject in Whites' suit, without

the breath assist, lasted 10 hours. A similar suit with Duncan's modifications lasted 18 hours.

As for core temperature-which was measured by a temperature­ transponding "pill" that Duncan swallowed -"We came out warmer than we went in," he said.

The management at Whites was convinced of the potential and Duncan set another goal to last more than 24 hours. And he invited Seattle TV celebrity John Curley of KING 5's "Evening Magazine" to join him in the water at John Wayne "'farina on Sequim Bay.

Captured on video and surrounded by press this time, it was not a test that Duncan wanted to fail.

Looking like an astronaut, Duncan was confident from the start, In fact he drove himself fully suited to the event in his pickup truck to demon­strate the mobility of his suit.

Curley drew a lot of attention, too, hopping into an ill-fitting jumbo suit and splashing around to see what it was like to be in distress.
Looking at Duncan, Curley quipped, "I feel like I'm in a Yugo."

Though he often plays the clown on TV, he'd studied up on hypother­mia and he was doing more than just fooling around. After an hour in the 49-degree water, it became more dif­ficult for him to keep his game face.

"I'm uncomfortable," he said. "My whole body's wet. My fingertips are still okay, but I'm colder. I've got a little tremble going."

A half-hour later, Curley told the staff monitoring his

condition, "Yeah, I'm very cold. My suit has a lot of water in it now." He pulled out, shook Duncan's hand and headed for the shower.

Duncan continued through the afternoon and the entire night, clam­ming up and hun­kering down behind his goggles and breathing into the mouthpiece to retain his heat. (Chit-chatting actually lowered his body temperature.) Remarkably, he never put on his gloves. He'd fitted the suit with a muff-like pouch on the belly where the air from the suit exhausted at 60 degrees.

Twenty-three hours into the test, Duncan was still doing fine with a core temperature of 37.15 degrees C measured by the temperature "pill." That's 98.87 degrees F. (Normal rec­tal temperature is 37.5 C or 99.5 F.)

The air temperature had been as low as 38 degrees that morning and the water was still holding at 49 degrees.

Duncan admitted that he had to work a bit at breathing to keep the suit warm at 4 a.m., but he still fig­ured correctly that "It was colder for the people on the dock."

At 1: 15 p.m. on Sunday, nearly 25 hours after he went in the water, Duncan climbed up a ladder to the dock, teed up a plastic golf ball and pasted it into the breakwater. He still had his suit on.

And everyone knew he was onto something big.  

SEQUIM - The water tem­  perature at John Wayne Marina measured a chilly 48 degrees Saturday morning.

That's too cold for swimming, or even a quick dip.

But when Sequim resident Bob Duncan jumped into the marina's water around noon, he planned to spend the next 25 hours there - and be plenty comfortable doing it.

He'll have help, of course. Duncan has spent the past four years trying to develop a coldwater survival suit that will

allow people to stay warm for hours or even days if they're stranded in cold ocean waters.

The result is the Latitude 98 suit, and he's been traveling from place to place in the Pacific Northwest and. using himself as a guinea pig in demonstrations.

The suit is based on a simple idea - recycling the heat from a person's exhaled breath to keep the creeping chill of the sur­rounding water at bay.

'FOOLING YOUR BODY'
"It's almost like you're fool­ing

your body" Duncan said Sat­ urday while floating in shallow water by the marina's boat slips.

The suit is waterproof and has a flotation device that helps the wearer remain face up in the water.

A breathing tube funnels exhaled air into bladders in the suit's back side, which is where the body would come in contact with the water.

There's also an exhaust vent into a handwarming tube on the suit's chest.

A person wearing the suit would have to refresh the air in the bladders every 10 to 15 minutes to keep the level of warmth constant.

Conventional survival suits - often called "Gumby suits" because people wearing them look like the animated charac­ter - rely on insulation and conserving body heat, Duncan said, and can only be counted on for a short period of time.

The Coast Guard estimates that a person in a Gumby suit retains "functional conscious-ness" for no more than 2 1/2hours, which can be not long enough for rescuers to arrive.

In tests so far, Duncan has spent much longer than that in waters in Alaska and British Columbia. His longest stretch until Saturday was 18 hours in a test near Victoria.

WORLD RECORD?
If Duncan lasts 25 hours in Sequim Bay - until around 1 p.m. today - he said he'll lay claim to the world record for coldwater survival.

Duncan, a Sequim resident and native, has been a commer­cial pilot for 29 years and cur­rently flies for Alaska Airlines. Though he's spent a lot of time around Northwest waters, he was never an expert on surviving in them.

"1 never touched or saw a survival suit before I had the idea for this," he said.

He credits reading news accounts of shipwrecks for injecting the subject into the back of his mind. since he was struck by how difficult it was for crewmen to survive once they were in the water.

But he still doesn't under­ stand why, exactly, the idea for recycling the body's hot air popped into his head in Decem­ber 2001 while he was vacation­ing with his family in Hawaii.

"I was awakened in the middle of the night [with the idea]," he said.

"I felt God spoke to me and gave me this idea."
After returning from vaca­tion) - they were living in Anchorage at the time - Dun­can put together a rough experiment to see if the idea was worth anything.

He donned chest waders and had his daughter cover most of his body with snow in 20-below­zero temperatures. He nm a hose from his mouth down one leg inside the waders.
After 80 minutes, that leg was fine - but the rest of him was freezing.

"1 knew there was some­thing there," Duncan said.
Making the idea really proved more difficult. His first attempt was a modified diving dry suit that wasn't so dry - it leaked "miserably." he said.

He applied for a government grant to fund research and development, and was instead handed reams of material detail­ing why his idea wouldn't work.

While the Coast Guard does not endorse specific products, the agency is always checking out new equipment and designs - because any- thing that can keep people alive in the water for even a few more hours greatly improves the chances of rescue, the Coast Guard said.

Duncan was angling for more than mere survival in his demonstration Saturday.

He staged a bit of theater, roping a television reporter into wearing a Gumby suit to show­case the differences between the two.

Duncan also predicted that the only ill effect from spend- ing 25 hours in the water would be a slight sleepiness,
"When I get out of this suit tomorrow," Duncan said Satur­ day, "I plan to hit some golf balls."

The prototype Duncan is floating in today was put together by Whites Manufac­ turing Ltd, in Victoria, which makes wet suits and dry suits.
The goal now, Duncan said, is to persuade the Coast Guard that his invention works.

Coast Guard Inspection: Two members of the Port Angeles Coast Guard Station's rescue team attended Saturday's demon-stration to inspect the suit and see it at work