I don’t dive as much as I used to. In fact, I’ve been high and dry since last August when I was diving daily, for a week, in Bonaire. I used to identify as a “Diver” with a capital “D” and disdained the notion of the once a year vacation dip in the deep. Complicating matters was the fact that, despite living in the “City of Lakes,” my hometown is, for all intents and purposes, landlocked. But between a couple of summer weekends diving wrecks in Lakes Superior and Michigan, and several annual weeks in the Caribbean, I was able to log over 50 dives a year for close to a decade. No rental-gear-wetsuit-on-backwards-“how-does-this-thing-work-again?” holiday diving for me. No, I was the “test pilot for the world’s most illustrious undersea timepieces” (New York Times, Oct. 6, 2017) and had a reputation to uphold. Given my chosen specialty, you could have almost called me a professional diver.
Certainly, the coronavirus pandemic played a role in my waning bottom time over the past two years, but I also had this creeping sense that there is little more to say about diving with watches beyond, well, the diving itself. After all, unless one leaks, most dive watches work equally well tracking time underwater. So I switched my focus to writing fiction, still largely about diving, but without the pressure of coming home with a folder of underwater wrist shots or traveling with a roll of expensive watches that didn’t belong to me. I re-discovered downhill skiing and running, a joy for cycling returned, not to mention gardening and shade-tree Land Rover repair. Still, I almost always wear a dive watch. Not because I need the water resistance, the rugged build, or the ability to track elapsed time, but because I simply love dive watches, in all their various forms.
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