Kingfisher Diver-Pro review

A few years ago I wrote an art­icle out­lining why I picked the watch I wear.  You can find it here: Basho’s watch : the choice.  As many of you know I am now 6 months into trav­el­ling the world and one of the major decisions I had to make before I left is, “what watch to take with me?”  In this art­icle I will out­line my choice and how it has per­formed in the toughest con­di­tions imaginable.

Firstly though, what makes a man’s watch?  It seems to me that the big names in male watches are strug­gling to sell their brands.  Unfor­tu­nately this has led to truly hideous watches that have all the hall­marks of a mar­ket­ing depart­ment strug­gling with not only real­ity, but also a sense of the times.

The times are hard.

For some, and per­haps this is you – I hope not, the response to hard times is to not only ignore them, but to spend more.  After all this is what the gov­ern­ment wants you to do to help the eco­nomy out of reces­sion.  For that reason, mod­ern watches are more expens­ive than ever.  Com­pan­ies are push­ing celebrity endorse­ments down everyone’s throat under the belief that we, as watch buy­ing men, don’t know that said celebrity was given (or even paid to wear) such-and-such a brand.

I hate celebrity endorse­ments.  Take this one:

All that I get from these adverts is that Tiger Woods needs more roughage in his diet.  I mean why the “look”?  That, “I have a big wal­let and no muesli,” look that is sup­posed to say, “Suc­cess, I have it – you want it.” Sure, Tiger is a good golfer, but do we really think that his watch defines that? This sort of thing is the advert­isers pulling the wool over our eyes to fool our heads.  Is the product any good? Will I look like a berk when wear­ing it? Lets have an actual look at the watch in question:

I am actu­ally amazed that Lewis Hamilton can tell the time on that over-designed lump on his wrist!  I mean, pre­sum­ably, he has to check his watch in a hurry while driv­ing 200 miles per hour.  If I was in that situ­ation I would want a watch that was easy to read.

I choose another path and it is this I want to speak to you about.

• The path I choose is one of form­ing a rela­tion­ship with your watch maker that goes bey­ond the financial.
• The path I choose is one where you are wear­ing a qual­ity watch that is worth more than any celebrity.
• The path I choose is one of the very best qual­ity at the optimum price.
• The path I choose is where people ask me about my watch and imme­di­ately go and buy one for themselves.
• Turn­ing heads mat­ters to me, I am a manly-man and I want a man’s watch.  How­ever, I don’t want any part of the “pre­tender” watch culture.

I there­fore turned to Chris­topher Ward Lon­don Lim­ited. His web­site makes his “mis­sion” clear:

We are a new watch­maker with a simple aim.

We want to put high qual­ity lux­ury watches within the reach of everyone.

To achieve this we have inver­ted the usual busi­ness model used by brands such as Rolex, Cartier and Omega. Instead of their extremely high mar­gin require­ments and the myriad of middle­men and retail­ers in the equa­tion, we take a small but fair mar­gin and have the ulti­mate dir­ect busi­ness with not a single middle­man and no retailer other than ourselves.

We can’t begin to match the hun­dreds of mil­lions spent on advert­ising cam­paigns, spon­sor­ships and “A” list celebrit­ies of our bet­ter known com­pet­it­ors. Instead, we con­cen­trate our efforts on design­ing beau­ti­ful timepieces and rely­ing on delighted cus­tom­ers to recom­mend the brand to fam­ily, friends and col­leagues on our behalf.

So, when I was look­ing for a timepiece to go around the world with I knew which com­pany I wanted to use.  I passed on the face­less mega-brands, and instead went quint­es­sen­tially for quality. My travels will include diving, cav­ing, many many flights; buses; trains, and even bungy jump­ing 140meters.  I needed a watch that didn’t quit on me. I even­tu­ally selec­ted the The King­fisher Diver-Pro.  It is described by Chris­topher him­self  in these terms:

I am a fan­at­ical scuba-diver as is Philip our Swiss trained man­u­fac­tur­ing part­ner so you can ima­gine how import­ant an addi­tion to the CWL col­lec­tion is our first divers watch. The brief was quite simple: Cre­ate the ulti­mate pro­fes­sional divers watch that mar­ries extreme con­di­tion func­tion­al­ity with exquis­ite good looks.

The qual­ity of this watch will be under­stood by all those famil­iar with all good things hiero­lo­gical (the Swiss Ronda cal­ibre 715 move­ment, the addi­tional thick­ness of the sap­phire glass, the screw-down case back with the engraved No Decom­pres­sion Table — per­haps a world first, the 2-piece uni-directional bezel and Super-luminova mark­ings, etc) which means the King­fisher is water res­ist­ant to an aston­ish­ing 30 atmospheres/1000 feet, but to under­stand its beauty as well, just look at it. It’s enough to make a grown man dive!

I sent in the order to include two straps; leather and rub­ber.  I have a large wrist and so needed to make sure that I could swap the straps if needed.

Fea­tures

• Swiss made
• 5 Jewel Ronda quartz movement
• 2 Piece uni-directional bezel
• Screw-in crown and back plate
• 30 atm (1000 feet) water res­ist­ant case
• 4.5mm Sap­phire crystal
• Adjustable strap with easy open­ing but­ter­fly clasp
• Highly lumin­es­cent indices bezel marker and hands
• Unique engraved serial num­ber and No Decom­pres­sion Limit table

You can also upgrade to a auto­matic move­ment ver­sion (ETA 2824–2), which winds on the wrist.  After a short wait it arrived (Shown here with the leather strap):

Metal strap option:

The box:

One of the best fea­tures about using Chris­topher Ward, no mat­ter the model you go for, is that the cus­tomer ser­vice is second to none.  I had called and checked the status of the order on numer­ous occa­sions and every time had received a full and help­ful reply.  Moreover the pack­aging included a wel­come let­ter signed by Mr Ward him­self, this wasn’t so much a pur­chase as a relationship.

The Watch

So lets have a closer look:

Once I had the watch in my hands it felt quite heavy, but it slipped into the wrist very eas­ily.  The sides of the case curve to match the wrist well.  Move­ment wise the auto­matic move­ment (ETA 2824–2) of the upgraded watch is top notch and of a qual­ity far above the price point.  The basic move­ment is the ever reli­able Ronda Quartz move­ment (pdf here) and forum posts and online reviews attest to its reli­ab­il­ity over time. The back­ing of the watch face is a cobalt blue that is a little darker than this photo sug­gests and the hands are highly lumin­es­cent. The dial of the King­fisher is avail­able in the col­ours black, white, yel­low, orange and blue.  The bezel aligns well and twists with a good click that makes time mark­ing simple and easy to use. The straps I ordered with the watch are only two of the four options avail­able.  I now only use the rub­ber strap.

The back of the watch includes a dive table.  This is, of course, not some­thing to bet your life on under the water, but it is a nice addition.

The rub­ber strap is stamped with a Chris­topher Ward logo and the clasp is a firm click to set.

More images:

Review

So, how did it per­form in the “real world”?

Upon receiv­ing the watch I wore it with the leather strap.  I must say that while it does look hansom in this con­fig­ur­a­tion, I very much prefer it with the rub­ber strap.  The leather is of a good qual­ity but not as nice as alligator (which is available). Time was at first a few seconds out per day and this is totally nor­mal for a Swiss move­ment.  After a few weeks it settled down and is now per­fectly accur­ate and consistent. I changed the strap to the rub­ber one myself.  This was highly unnerv­ing and not some­thing I want to have to do again.  Mainly because without the right tools such a pro­ced­ure is going to be much harder than it needs to be.  I even­tu­ally used my Leather­man to assist.  Once the leather strap was off (the easy part), I cut the rub­ber to the required length and then pro­ceeded to attach it.  The trick in doing so it to make sure that the pin’s heads are com­pletely pushed into the holes before wear­ing.  Once this is achieved the strap is very sturdy and has not been any prob­lem in over a year.

I took the watch diving in the Great Bar­rier Reef:

and the watch per­formed per­fectly.  I dived a total of 14 times in 3 days.  I even took it down to 25 meters and both the tim­ing and the hand’s lumin­es­cence (3 seconds torch charged) worked fine. A total suc­cess and a few of the dive instruct­ors asked where I had got such a nice watch.

Hav­ing suc­cess­fully tested the watches primary func­tion, I wanted to give it a challenge.

I rode with the watch up Mount John in New Zea­l­and and it worked fine at that height.  I could detect no changes in move­ment and tim­ing.  Also the strap worked fine on my very sweaty wrist without turn­ing nor mov­ing out of position. Even this was not enough for me.  I wanted to test the watch under the highest stress I could and since I am not a test pilot I had only one choice:

At 250 meters above a river, the Nevis is New Zealand’s highest bungy jump with a fall-distance of 134 meters.  It involves a drop with 8 seconds of free-fall, a mighty snap and hav­ing all that momentum sud­denly reversed as the bungy reaches its longest point and pulls you back.

I made a video of my experience:

The watch again per­formed splen­didly.  Noth­ing broke lose and noth­ing showed any signs of stress.  This is a watch designed for action. I then took the watch into the Jungles of South East Asia.  In such envir­on­ments any watch will have to put up with com­ing into con­tact with all sorts of chem­ic­als. Namely DEET, the act­ive ingredi­ent in anti-mosquito spray, and some­thing we lathered all over skin open to the ele­ments.  The use of DEET was made fam­ous in Desert Storm when the mid strength ver­sion (up to 50% con­cen­tra­tion) man­aged to melt the rub­ber and plastic on the SA80 battle rifle.

I have used DEET up to 90% con­cen­tra­tion and have had no prob­lems with the strap melt­ing.  A vic­tory again for the CW brand.

In my travels the watch has drawn looks and admir­ing com­ments from a very var­ied group of people.  While not so out­land­ish that I become a tar­get for rob­bers, it is an eye grab­ber and I have had con­ver­sa­tions with dive instruct­ors, Tuk-Tuk drivers, fel­low trav­el­lers and all sorts of Indian street urchins.  It seems that the brand is not one that eli­cits deri­sion of spend, nor does it reek of cheapness.  It says quality.

On a train in India, writ­ing this article:

In Mum­bai:

On my wrist in Hanoi, Viet­nam dur­ing Tet:

Clearly, this is a man’s watch.  Clearly, this is a brand to be proud of.  Clearly you should con­sider Chris­topher Ward in your next watch pur­chase.  I will con­tinue to wear mine over the next 6 months of travel and if it fails at all I will post here.

If you are inter­ested in hav­ing a Chris­topher Ward watch please click below to open his web­site: Chris­topher Ward watches.

Regards,

Basho

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