Requirements for a sailing watch ?

[PlankWalker]

Waterproof, cheap, easy to read dial, and good timekeeper.

Timex Expedition. Around £16 a couple of years ago. Keeps better time than my Rolex and has a light as well as luminous hands.

+1 It just tells the time! No infuriating noises that you cant turn off because you haven't got the manual.

Plank

 

[[70521]]

I've got one that gets the time by radio ... so I know its always correct.

 

[alant]

Waterproof, cheap, easy to read dial, and good timekeeper.

Timex Expedition. Around £16 a couple of years ago. Keeps better time than my Rolex and has a light as well as luminous hands.

My preference as well.

Changed from a previous casio, because sailing at 0300 hrs in February, on the helm middle of English Channel, with heavy duty gloves on, found that I couldn't read the digital display without fumbling for the illumination button.

Timex analogue, easy to see.

If I need to know moon phases, I use that well know trick - I look up at night!
easy then to know if neaps/springs.

 

[johnalison]

I've used a Casio barometer watch for many years. It enables me to pontificate about the weather to no great effect and determine at what depth I have drowned. It isn't much good for telling the time; for that I usually set my Graphic display to show the time at night.

 

[Fire99]

I have a Timex Expedition E-Tide which has a compass, temperature, etc etc and a nice big face and a very comfortable leather strap. It gets used for sailing.....Never. It's Huge!! Lovely watch. Very comfy, but only gets used when I go out.

I also have a Casio AQW-100. Has tide malarkey and a whole host of other functions, which I use none of. Still small enough to sail in and the stainless strap doesn't irritate my wrist like the rubber ones do and it's rugged as you like. For 40 or 50 quid, It's a nice looking watch.

 

[Boo2]

Well, "Cheap, accurate, waterproof and reliable" seems to be a popular refrain, understandably. I'm a bit surprised to see tides are not rated much, how about a watch that interrogates the ship's GPS and looks up the tide from an internally stored table to display ?

3. Easy to read when it and your specs are covered in spray
4. With a light for dark night watches
5. With an alarm to get you up for those dark night watches

Easy to read, good backlight, loud alarms and multiple timers also stand out, but how about tying into the boat's notebook to give time to next active watch etc ? And an accelerometer to tell when you've nodded off on watch and give an alarm to wake you ?

I like to keep reasonably up to date with astro and I like using a sextant. For this, I use two Casio digital watches. Many suggest to have 3 and I can see the logic.

So what would 3 watches be used for ?

I don't know if there is a particular method for simultaneously clocking the time and the sextant reading. I usually take the sight and mentally count the seconds until I read the watch. I always try to take at least 5 sights and draw the results on a hand written graph to get the best fit.

How about a button which stores the actual time at the moment it is pressed ? Would that be a practical solution ?

Solar cell powered, so the battery does not run empty while one is far away and cannot get a new one properly installed (lost two watches because those that changed the battery did not change the waterproofing gasket).

Would easy user-changability of the battery be an acceptable alternative ? My Suunto has this facility and it seems ok on land at least.

Crew has an Optimum Time 5:4:1:0 countdown watch, which is very good. You can synch the timing at the second or third gun.
For proper yachting, something that tells you the date is good!

So a buton that synchs the countdown when pressed at the gun would be useful ? Can you explain your thinking about the date for me ?

I've used a Casio barometer watch for many years. It enables me to pontificate about the weather to no great effect

My watch has a baro too, I was wondering about a facility for guesstimating wind speed from barometric rise/fall, does anyone here know how accurate that can be ?

Any other requests ?

Boo2

 

[Deleted member 36384]

Any other requests ?

Boo2

You may as well build an Almanac into it, a time drift calculation feature from time signals (so that it knows how much it drifts between time signals), the ability to calculate position from sextant readings, course and distance sailed. And a compass, set of sights, angle measurement. I am not being flippant, its probably all possible in a reasonable sized watch.

 

[stevebrassett]

I went for a solar-powered Citizen that I also wear as my everyday watch. Solar powered so the battery never needs replacing and the waterproof seals don't get disturbed.

 

[Yacht Yogi]

Tides on watch useless

I used to have a Casio with tides but that feature was completely useless. Obviously it needs to know not just the time but where you are. Then the algorithm is too simple and will not predict the times accurately. It cannot capture local tial curves that can get very complex in places like the Solent or Poole Harbour and it is not displaying real tidal height.

The tidal information you need is very complex to predict. A friend showed me his 3G phone with Navionics and tides on Saturday and was most surprised to see that its prediction of High Water at Portsmouth on the morniong of 30th June was wrong by about +1/2 hour. Go check if you dont believe me! High water by Admiralty Easy Tide and Almanac was both saying 08:28 the phone App was wrong by a significant amount. Could be very embarrasing on a rapidly falling tide. So what chance does a simple watch have of being right?

 

[dutyhog]

Waterproof, cheap, easy to read dial, and good timekeeper.
Timex Expedition

Me too. I use it all the time for everything, but I'm on my second one in 12 years - they don't last long, especially if you replace the battery without properly resealing it.

The leather strap fell apart a month or so ago, but I had a "Stainless Steel double security clasp bracelet" from a previous watch - a Tidemaster Tacticel, which was an almost identical Timex with a custom bezel.


They have features that I really use:
Alarms - 24 hour, log reading and countdown
Timer-setable from 24 hours to 1 minute.
Including 24 hour deckwatch facility
Chronograph that freezes time of sight and 100th second pilotage stopwatch
Electro Luminescence that illuminates both dial and digital display with Night Mode

 

[Boo2]

IHigh water by Admiralty Easy Tide and Almanac was both saying 08:28 the phone App was wrong by a significant amount. Could be very embarrasing on a rapidly falling tide. So what chance does a simple watch have of being right?

Depends on it's stored data I guess ? Assuming 50 tide stations and 14 days worth of tide data that would fit int 8 or 16kB or so, should be managable by a modern ultra-low power cpu no probs.

Where to get the accurate data from in the first place at a reasonable cost would be more of an issue, anyone have any ideas ?

Boo2

 

[Boo2]

Alarms - ...log reading...
...
Including 24 hour deckwatch facility
...100th second pilotage stopwatch

Can you be a bit more explicit about what these facilities do ?

Thanks,

Boo2

 

[Roberto]

You may as well build an Almanac into it, a time drift calculation feature from time signals (so that it knows how much it drifts between time signals), the ability to calculate position from sextant readings, course and distance sailed. And a compass, set of sights, angle measurement.

don't forget miniature ColRegs

 

[john_morris_uk]

I wear one of those watches made by the sponsors of Wimbledon and a few yacht races It serves no useful purpose aboard, though, because it's a relatively poor time keeper.

I was given one of those a few years ago. I wear it all the time and am somewhat flummoxed by some people's comments about what they require in a watch.

If I want a race start timer I use the one on the instruments...

Otherwise the watch is waterproof and keeps quite good time. It's not perfect, but the rate us constant so I can work out what the time is exactly if I want - even without a time signal

The comments that really confuse me are the ones about losing watches overboard. We must have very different sailing styles as we don't usually lose anything overboard let alone a watch attached to a wrist. Similarly, my watch takes the odd knock and it's not pristine and unmarked, but it keeps time and us easy to read so it sort if does its job...

If I want to know the tides I look them up on my phone or look at the almanac, but perhaps I'm old fashioned like that?

 

[dutyhog]

Can you be a bit more explicit about what these facilities do ?
Boo2

I just picked it up to check my answers, pressed a button and the whole analogue dial and digital display stopped. Maybe coincidentally the battery packed in, maybe something worse.

You can set a normal alarm for any time in the next 24 hours, countdown from 24 hours or less (pausing and restarting the count if needed), time events (and "laps" within them) - which can include from a sighting time until you next look at the watch, and see the whole thing in the dark with its Electro Luminescent dial and digital display. The light is also bright enough to find the keyhole when I get back to the boat or home (no street lights here). The beep is rather quiet.
Gordon

 

[lw395]

In reply to Boo2's question, I find checking the date on my watch before reading the tidal data from the almanac is worthwhile. If I checked today was Weds the 4th, I'd be sure that I was looking at the right month.

In reply to another point about losing watches overboard, I have lost two.
One got caught on the spinnaker guy of a Fireball dinghy in a lot of wind.
The other got snagged while dealing with a tangled mooring.


Both were cheap Casio watches with plastic straps. These straps tend to harden and crack a little with age. You can replace the strap, but normally by that time the face of the watch is well scratched and the battery is quite possibly in its last year, so it is almost as well to get a new watch for £12.99
It's better to break a plastic strap than to have a metal bracelet caught in something. I've never found metal straps comfortable, personally.

I wear my watch 24/7 and they get scratched doing building work, metal work etc etc.
On average I think they last more than 5 years.
My previous one is still working, the strap went, so I glued it to my scuba compass!

 

[Nicholas123]

I use my everyday 35 quida because it's got a nice readable face with hands so I don't have to frig about looking for my specs.

Recently bought a super dupa Casio Sea-Pathfinder from the charity shop I work in for less than a fiver & it seems brand new.......the previous owner like me probably got pissed off with the complexity.
How the hell do you set your location accurately."Lunitidal Interval" if you don't live on a longitude with London? I think the thing will probably drive me mad.(I have yet to wear it).

 

[jubro]

My favourite watch has been a Timex digital with a bezel marked in compass points. I use the bezel for approximate tide times - North is HW and South is LW. When I'm near an accurate tide table for where I am, I set the bezel so North points to the place the hour hand would be at HW. Then I click in on 4 clicks (about 50 minutes) each morning when I strap on the watch, which gives me rough-and-ready tide times. After about two weeks it's only about 30 minutes out, which works for me - and no buttons to remember. I use the stopwatch as a race start countdown (working backwards). It also has a digital compass, which is surprisingly useful because it's always to hand. I can take rough bearings from the rail when racing. The only things it's missing are an infinite battery and an indestructible strap.

 

[ERICH]

Sailing watches ~ CASIO W763

My favourite sailing wristwatch is a CASIO Sailing Watch # W-763 available from Amazon and others for around £18. Very good for general boating use and good battery life etc. , only problem is the resin strap is not that durable but at the price if it does a couple of seasons thats OK

 

[Trident 24]

Help with watches

How the hell do you set your location accurately."Lunitidal Interval" if you don't live on a longitude with London? I think the thing will probably drive me mad.(I have yet to wear it).

Hope this linky thing works:
http://www.pol.ac.uk/ntslf/sharing_knowledge.php