The Right Way to Read a Dive Watch
These seemingly simple watches are sometimes not so simple.
Originally published by Jason Heaton on Hodinkee.
The dive watch is a simple creature, a “blunt instrument” if you will, with a simple but important brief: track elapsed time legibly under a fair amount of water pressure. And the earliest ones – Blancpain’s Fifty Fathoms, the Rolex Submariner, Zodiac’s Sea Wolf – got it right, with 300 feet of water resistance, clear dials and rotating timing rings. As the dive watch evolved, what then was left to improve? Bezels ratcheted and locked, bands were invented to adjust for compressed neoprene sleeves, and, of course, water resistance was increased. But with a limited scope of things to tweak, watch brands went to work implementing solutions to help divers solve problems underwater in an attempt to make diving safer. These solutions came in the form of bezels and dials (and in some cases, straps) that incorporated ways for divers to not only track overall time, but calculate no-decompression times, and decompression stops, in an age before digital dive computers took over the difficult work.