WHENTIME ISOFTHE ESSENCE
SERENE. Silent. Slow motion. An eerie stillness pervades the mysterious world underwater. Suddenly, a blur of colours whizzes past, darting from out of nowhere. It’s a school of fish piercing the murky canvas. And then the silence again. Serenity permeates. But let not the calm fool you because anything can happen when you’re in the darkened depths of the world’s biggest aquarium. Ask any dive enthusiast and they’ll tell you that although diving deep is a rewarding challenge, it’s highly risky. Many divers have died for various reasons — ascending too fast, running out of air, or missing deco stops (a diver missing a required decompression stop increases the risk of developing decompression sickness). Thus, being super vigilant over one’s air consumption, deco limits and time (dive time and time to surface) is very important.
“I’ve probably spent more than 10,000 or maybe 12,000 hours in the water and traveled hundreds and hundreds of kilometres on the Great Barrier Reef underwater. It’s really important to have a reliable watch because, yes, it sounds dramatic, but your life really does depend on it. Time flies by and you have no idea how long you’ve been in the water until suddenly you find yourself shaking with cold,” begins Dr Gerry Goeden, a Malaysian-based marine ecologist who’s here in the tropical paradise of Langkawi as a guest speaker for the launch ceremony of French luxury timepiece brand, Bell & Ross’ latest dive instruments, two new versions of the BR 03-92 Diver — the BR03-92 Diver Blue and the BR03-92 Diver Bronze, the first square diving watches from the brand.
Continuing enthusiastically, Goeden says: “You can be in the depth of 12m and you can stay for 200 minutes. If you’re at 30m, you can stay for 10 minutes. You really need to keep track of the time. Honestly, there have been times when I’ve been underwater and suddenly wanted to check on the time only to find my watch full of water. Then panic sets in and you think, my God, I’m in trouble now. But I’ve been lucky.”
By the time you’re down past 30m, it’s easy to start making mistakes, adds the genial American who migrated to Australia at the age of 21 and worked on the Great Barrier Reef in fisheries research and marine park management. “The deepest I’ve dived is probably about 54m and that’s way past my safe limit because at that depth, the nitrogen and the air that you’re breathing start to have a narcotic effect (nitrogen narcosis). Every 15m is the equivalent of a martini!” His eyes lingering on the square, sportylooking timepiece on his wrist — the BR0392 Diver Blue — loaned to him especially for this launch event, Goeden adds: “It’s important to have a good watch that you can set a dial on that remembers because once you’ve had two or three martinis, you can’t remember!”
When he first started out, Goeden, the man behind The Andaman Langkawi’s Coral Garden Project, confides that he never had any fancy watch that went with him underwater. “What I had was ‘brandless’ and it was a young lady in high school who gave it to me. I remember that it was a waterproof watch, at that time a pretty new kind of thing. It didn’t last very long. And neither did the romance, I might add!”
Since then, he’s had a series of watches “...and basically they’ve all been damaged, leaked, or cracked because I hit them against something. My advice is to buy the