Tales from the Paddling Pool - Part Two

Well, the Summer seems to be over today. It's "Mostly Cloudy". Temperatures are only 70°F again unlike yesterday's 84°F, so it's a good job I did a lot of watch testing when I had the chance.

First let me set the scene with a picture of my Sunday setup.

Yes, Paul, the grass is dead all over the place, and it gets worse beyond the pool. All this will change now that it's likely to rain again for the rest of the year. @weedge

I set up my state-of-the-art entertainment system, as you can see, just so I could heckle the local radio presenters who seem to be on day release from some kind of institution. I've never heard so many "ums" and "ers" and mispronunciations outside of YouTube, and that's saying something. At least the music they played wasn't all horrible.

I noticed the lyrics to Dire Strait's "Money For Nothing" have been changed which bothered me even though I'm hardly the greatest fan of the band. "Yo-yos"? Know what I'm saying? The wokies need to leave our music alone. We probably all have the original version anyway so they can't win.

But I'm getting ahead of myself by already showing you one of the watches. Oh well, might as well show you the rest now.

Ignore the cigarette warning, I always do. I can't see that happening, and I've been smoking since I was in the womb. Smoking is cool. The government even used to recommend it back in the day when people still had respect left for the politicians. How things change.

Anyway, the pool had a lot more bits of grass and dead insects floating in it, and the algae had started to get a grip despite having dozens of chlorine tablets floating in the dispenser, so it's probably for the best that I won't be doing this again until I set up my reserve 8ft paddling pool later.

I started with my Sekonda World Time which I use as my gardening watch. I painted it with black hammerite last year and replaced all the gaskets, so it should pass any water resistance test. It claims only 50m, but I think it would be good for a lot more.

Lots of bubbles came out as I dunked it, but it seems to have survived and no water got inside.

The nato strap obviously absorbed a lot of water, so I hung it up on the washing line to dry out like the flag of the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Red, white, and blue is appropriate to a ton of other nationalities though including my own, and I have a lot of these.

The next to be tested, although I'm not sure that the pics will be in the correct chronological order, was my Casio MTD-1053D.

I love this watch. I bought it from a Spanish seller on Spanish Amazon because it's not a model available in the UK. It's almost the perfect dive watch for me and I should wear it more.

Sometimes when I'm alone in the pool, I like to choke my chicken. You know you'd do it too, so don't judge.

Anyway, the Casio obviously passed the water resistance test. It has all the divery things you need including the screw down crown. It's basically a 40mm Duro with a nicer dial like a Longines Hydroconquest and a load of others.

Next for the dunking was my Vostok "Century Time" Amphibia from the early 2000s.

Nice big pic of it here: https://www.watchcrunch.com/wruw/2023-06-25#comment-555320

For those of you who like history, Century Time were a short-lived U.S. importer and seller of Vostoks and had their own custom dials. Another one was RussArmy which no longer exists either. I went for the Century Time because I liked the dial, even though they missed a trick by not luming any of the big numbers or even adding dots of lume as indices.

It's an Amphibia so there was no chance of this ever failing. I could put in an offensive war joke here, but I won't this time. Oh wait... put in... I'll get my coat.

Yeah, I love my Vostoks even though half of the ones I own don't work anymore. This one still does though.

I know what you're thinking, "You aren't testing them to a very deep level, are you?" You'd be right, but this is as deep as I'm prepared to go, and it's more than enough for me. Plus how deep do you think a paddling pool will be? The clue is in the name. 😉

I've been scuba diving once in my life and didn't enjoy it. It was boring, I couldn't smoke underwater because it made my cigarettes all soggy and difficult to light, and yeah, it was just boring. It made my chest ache afterwards too, so never again.

But in the spirit of great adventurers like James Cameron, Inspector Clouseau, and Wile E. Coyote, let's go a bit deeper with my new Sekonda dive watch as a bonus.

I was almost an arm's length down at one point, which rivals OceanGate's submersibles now. No implosions here though. Any gas bubbles in the water were purely of my own creation due to eating baked beans on toast.

I noticed that depending on the angle, the dial on the Sekonda was impossible to read underwater. Presumably this is why the eBay seller got rid of it to me for only a fiver. No lume on it either, so it's lucky I did my testing in daylight.

Ah well, I love my Sekondas regardless of whether they do what they look like they can do. I've never had any problems with water resistance with any of them, so I recommend them to everybody.

I'm never likely to be 50m underwater unless there's been an apocalyptic disaster, so 50m is good enough for anyone. Yeah, I know it's all about pressure and movement as well, but if it says 50m water resistant on the dial, it'll always be good for sitting in a paddling pool on a Sunday afternoon.

Time to return to dry land now. My Poundland Gucci slides await!

Could I get more chavvy? Oh, trust me, I really could.

Here are some British corner shop sweets for Andy since he expressed an interest in talking about them in the comments section. @Bayl61

I might do some further water resistance tests if the weather changes again, or I might try some altitude tests on a step-ladder (it's not my real biological ladder), and maybe even some velocity tests on my Halfords mountain bike. I get bored easily so anything could happen.

Let me know if you'd like to read more of these ridiculous posts in the comments below.