Price: £120/€150
Flex/Comfort: 6/10
Warmth: 5/10
Overall: 6/10

Test date: 19/04/14
Tested at: Capbreton, France
Air: 18
Water: 14
Dry Weight: 760g
Also: Feels more like a Desmond than a 3/2…
Tested by: PE

In brief: A light, bright, value suit, decent but no game-changer.

Brand Overview

I didn’t know anything about Ion, so I had a peep on their website and discovered that they are into bikes and watersports. Now those of you with hipster sensitivities might be turned off by the word surf having prefixes like ‘wake’, ‘wind’ etc, but hey. They’ve got a massive product range, and if you’re doing something ‘action sportsy’, chances are they make gear that’ll heighten your gnarly adrenalin rush, so to speak.

The Test

While ‘semi dry’ might conjure up images of those rubbery windsurfing/diving suits with a massive stiff armpit to armpit horizontal zip, The Ion Onyx is quite the opposite. This is very much at the thin end of the 3/2 spectrum, super light, in fact it feels Desmond-y (Archbishop… Tutu… 2/2… no? Tough crowd.) The lightest suit in the test by far at under 800g. That’s significantly less than a new-ish bag of sugar after a group of builders have had several tea breaks!

Overall the Ion Onyx felt OK, if perhaps a touch over-designed. The limbs are super pre-bent, even the cuffs are quite severely angled with ergonomic design in mind, but perhaps over-cooked in reality. The zip felt a bit fiddly (as in feeding the slot into the thingy) and a tad budget in terms of hardware, it also opens on the right shoulder, a rarity. In terms of the neck… there’s far too much of it; I know turtlenecks are back in, but 2cm less Gregory Peck mightn’t be a bad thing at all.

The key pocket is inside left calf, which is rare, but didn’t bother me in the drink at all, in fact, I usually ride down on my bike to surf with the key attached to the string in the wetsuit’s keypocket. It’s actually much easier to use the still-attached key from the inside of the leg, in fact, you can do it still sitting on the bike, which is pretty cool.

It was just about warm enough in quite a paddley, energetic surf on a warm day, with a fair few trickles and a couple of flushes. Given the lightness and thinness overall, I’d say this is more of a warmer water 3/2, great for SW France from May to Oct, less so for NE Scotland. It has a few km’s of seams in it only one bit of tape, around the crotch, thus ‘semi-dry’ is ambitious, much more ‘semi’ than ‘dry’. It does come in very much at the lower end of the price spectrum, so if you get two summers out of it and a few Canaries trips, you’re well stoked. I reckon £120 squid on this suit is money pretty well spent.

In terms of the look, the Ion Onyx is coming in as pretty much the polar opposite to Patagonia in every way. It’s light, bright with big logos… it looks more like the kind of suit you’d wear if you like moto-x and/or think doing burn outs on a jetski is cool. The name of the model is ‘Onyx’ which everyone in the lineup is reminded of by it being written across the back in a size that wouldn’t look out of place on the fuselage of an aircraft. It might be one of the biggest wetsuit logos in surfing since Kana Beach’s (RIP) enormous sun on the back thingy…

In Summary

The Ion Onyx is real decent effort in terms of having a go at the value end of the surfing wetsuit market, although at the same time, If I were one of the big players, I wouldn’t exactly be shitting myself.

Ion wetsuits