Testing The Water Resistance Of My Watch

Back after perhaps the best vacation I've ever had - a week at the beautiful island of Maui, Hawaii. All credit goes to my wonderful fiancé who made this happen, including a stay at the Four Seasons Resort (exceptional service received). 'But, what has this got to do with watches' is probably what you all must be thinking. Well it so happened that the trip to Maui had quite a bit of activities that involved water. This included swimming, snorkelling, getting knocked about by surprising powerful waves at the beach and jumping into the water from rocks about 20ft high. It's the last one that I was a bit worried about doing with a watch on.

In order to learn more about this, I went on to one of the watch forums and asked if it was ok to wear a watch and jump into the water from a height. I got the usual sarcastic comments about worrying unnecessarily when it comes to getting a watch wet, but that's not what I was looking for. I wanted specially to know if it's ok to jump from a height into the water. I did get some pretty good and reassuring responses as well, so I decided to go for it. If you're still thinking I'm worrying too much, it's because the watch in question was my Panerai PAM005, not what you would call a cheap watch.

Enjoying the view from the pool

I chose the PAM because it came with a rubber strap, and something I could wear at a nice place as well (like the Four Seasons). I didn't want to carry more than one watch on the trip. The other option I had was the Submariner, but I have worn that on quite a few trips and wanted to give the Panerai some wrist time.

So, how did it do? Well, it passed with flying colours! Absolutely no issues whatsoever. There was no condensation, no spring bar coming lose (which was my biggest concern) after multiple jumps including somersaults, and even on a cloudy day it was very easy to tell the time underwater. All I had to remember to do was to rinse the watch with freshwater after taking a swim in the sea, so as to the wash the salt off.

time check underwater while snorkelling

Cheers!