So why would anyone be looking for a cheap dive watch? First thing I have to wonder about is whether they have a death wish. I hope what they really mean is they want a watch that meets the demands of scuba diving, yet doesn’t break the bank.
The word cheap brings to mind characteristics of not just inexpensive, but low, or questionable quality of a “throw-away” nature. In other words, when it breaks after awhile, I’ll just pitch it and get another.
I can actually understand someone saying they wanted a cheap watch if the intended use was other than diving. If it stops working the only thing you lose is knowledge of the time, which is no big deal.
But if your dive watch stops working while you’re at 110 feet of depth, and you don’t notice right away, it could kill you. That may sound far-fetched, but if you were depending on it as your primary timing device (i.e. diving without a computer or backup timer), you have at a minimum, lost the means for accurately knowing your no-decompression limits.
If you ended up unknowingly exceeding those limits and then surfaced, it’s very likely you would suffer some degree of decompression Illness (DCI), otherwise known as the bends.
DCI is where the nitrogen in your blood forms tiny bubbles that can get trapped. If they happen to become trapped somewhere important like the brain, odds are, you’ll die. At best, they may get lodged in a joint causing severe pain, or perhaps crippling.
Obviously it makes no sense whatever to chance serious injury because one wants to be cheap. I can remember quite clearly while working on an open water scuba certification, our instructor suggesting we ought to be spending as much as we could possibly afford on our gear.
He offered many reasons, but the most significant was because our lives depended on it.
So if what you really want is a watch for scuba diving that is reliable, rugged enough for the demands on it, yet reasonable in price, then great. That makes a lot more sense than going for “cheap”, disposable, and deadly.
