On Dive watches.
On Dive watches.
One of my few (lol) kit obsessive tendencies is for dive watches. For other divers its torches, for some its masks (wait I have that one too), for me after my general diving kit, its watches. I like a nice watch, be it a dive watch or a dress watch.
A Shearwater Petrel with cable for a rebreather like the SF2 is around £1400 at the time of writing. So two of those will be £2800 which is still considerably less than £3680 which is the current price of the Tudor Pelgos FXD allegedly used by the French Marine Nationale.
You can get a nice Doxa as a dive watch with a very nice pedigree for a little bit more or around the same price as one Shearwater, but of course it only tells the time and doesn’t do GF calculations, gas tracking, decompression maths or anything else you can do with a decent dive computer, most can also tell the time.
Therein, as the bard tells us, lies the rub. The fact I can buy a very sexy dive watch that looks nice and tells the time but otherwise is fairly useless when compared to a dive computer that’s certified to the same depth seems to render the watch a bit pointless.
So why do I love dive watches? Firstly it’s simply the only piece of male jewellery I can tolerate and I’ve worn a watch since I was a child so I miss not having one on my wrist. For dive watches specifically, it harkens back to an earlier time. When true underwater pioneers had to rely on a timepiece to track air and decompression. The sense too of owning a beautiful item that is itself a tool and able to tolerate the very extremes of places I’m ever likely to go and far beyond. I will shortly be able to dive to 60m (legally) and to have a piece of kit that can go to 10 or even 100 times that amount and withstand the pressure and still function is rather remarkable. Which is great for me - but still doesn’t explain why MN get Tudors! Incidentally the only watch in my collection I’ve ever dived with is the $50 (or £50 basically) Casio ‘Duro’ the nato strap on which was nearly the same cost as the watch.
I have recently managed to get a Scurfa MS25 (the 2025 limited edition dive watch). I also own the MS24. These British micro-brand dive watches have their own developing dive pedigree as the company is owned and run by a working saturation diver. So when people moan about watches (Omega I’m looking at you) having a Helium escape valve - this guy actually needs one. I was intending to take a sexy photo of the MS25 at 40+ m on a wreck… but see my previous post, so that will have to wait.
