Nobody wears a dive watch diving. Or at least that’s how it seemed when I showed up at Gilboa Quarry for my scuba certification checkout dives last fall.
After weeks of confined water diving and classroom sessions I was one weekend away from becoming a certified diver. As I packed my car the night before I’d carefully set out my pair of tanks, BC, fins, boots, wetsuit, hood, gloves, etc along with my watch.
On what would likely be the last relatively warm weekend of the season, Gilboa was full of midwesterners, a region famous for its scuba diving of course, trying to squeeze in a final plunge before temps called for a drysuit. Divers from Detroit and Chicago had made their way down, a local sheriff’s office were practicing SAR at depths of 100+ feet, divers rocketed past with scooters (also known as a DPV, diver propulsion vehicle, a device similar to an inert torpedo with a place for a diver to hang on) all happening while my group made the transition to open water for the first time.
To my surprise as my group donned 7mm wetsuits, hoods, gloves, and boots (Ohio can be cold in early October) as far as I could tell, next to nobody at the quarry had bothered to bring a watch. That’s not to say we didn’t all have the ability to track the time. In my case, clipped to my BC was an Aqualung i550C, a simple dive computer on loan from the scuba shop certifying me. As I’d dive that weekend I checked its no-nonsense LCD display to monitor my air, depth, and elapsed time, glancing at my wrist only occasionally to find the gleam of a 126610LN Submariner Date, my wedding watch. I did find occasion to actually put the watch to use exactly once, timing a safety stop before returning to the surface though given the depth and duration of the dive it was more or less a formality anyway.
Thanks to years of exposure to carefully crafted press releases, watch media, ads, and boutique displays I’d come to expect that a dive watch was still a vital, albeit anachronistic, component of a diver’s equipment. Hell, my open water course had even briefly touched on the workings of a dive watch. As I quickly discovered however, bringing a dive watch to a dive in the 21st century is like bringing a knife (or sword) to a gunfight. I’d been duped. The gap in utility wasn’t even close. Modern computers track not only elapsed time but depth, can approximate nitrogen buildup in your tissues, some are even air integrated and can give you the amount of air left in your tank(s) in real time.
I spent my formative years enthralled by Grandpa’s Rolex 5513, a well-worn, never-serviced Submariner with a jingly bracelet and creamy plots of long dead radioactive tritium luminescent material that had been generously painted on the dial decades before my birth. I liked the feel of a watch on my wrist, I liked the sound of it dutifully ticking away, and more than anything I liked the adventures the watch implied when worn on a wrist tanned by years bouncing from one tropical island to the next so when the time came that I could afford one of my own it was a no-brainer. In fact it was owning a Sub that had gotten me into diving in the first place. So, despite its apparent absolute obsolescence if you run into me on a dive boat between Gilboa and Bimini more likely than not I’ll have my computer on one wrist and a good, old fashioned dive watch on the other.
Lead photo by the author