Tag: Casio Marlin

The Casio Marlin

By Joe Berk

I’ve mentioned my Casio Marlin (also known as the Duro) a few times in previous blogs.  I love this watch for any number of reasons:  It’s accurate, it’s rugged, it’s waterproof, it’s comfortable, and it’s inexpensive.  It’s a diver’s watch, but I’m not a diver.  I just like the look of thing.  I’ve worn it on a few big moto trips including the ride around the Andes Mountains in Colombia.  It poured cats and dogs on that trip.  The Marlin was unfazed.

At about $50, this watch has to be the deal of the century.  Just for grins I grabbed a picture of the Rolex Sea Dweller and put it along side the Casio.  If you own a Rolex don’t get your shorts in a knot ((I own one, too).   But the comparison has to make you wonder:  Let’s see, $50 for the Casio and $16,500 (or whatever it is these days) for the Sea Dweller (if you can find one and in today’s market that’s not easy).  As Aristotle would say….hmmmmm.

Yeah, you can go a little deeper with the Rolex (they say down to 3,900 meters).  My Casio says it’s good for 200 meters.  That’s over 600 feet down.  It’s not likely I’ll ever visit those regions and if I ever do I can guarantee you the time of day is not what will be on my mind.

I’ve owned my Marlin for about 10 years now.  I think I’ve had to replace the battery twice.  My guy charges me $3.25 to install a new battery (parts and labor).  The strap got stiff and cracked, so I’ve replaced that once (I think it was $10).  I checked and the cost of a replacement resin Rolex band is close to $300.  On the other hand, the Rolex is self-winding, so it never needs a battery.   Again….hmmmm.

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On that comfort thing…the Casio Marlin is about the right size for a man’s watch and the resin band is very comfortable.  I always forget I have it on and on more than a few occasions I’ve gone into the water wearing it (swimming, showering, and most recently, almost being swept away in my Subaru going to the gun club).  It doesn’t matter to the Casio.  I’d say it’s indestructable, but some Internet weenie would want to get into a urinating contest about that.

Boarding the ferry in Magangué on the Magdelena River.  Even there, the Casio’s good looks and functionality appealed to an onlooker.

When I rode Colombia with Juan and Carlos, one time we had to wait a couple of hours on a hot and humid afternoon for the ferry to come in and carry us down the Magdalena River to Mompos.  While we were waiting in what little shade we could find in Magangué, a young Colombian boy came over and touched the Casio, nodding his approval.  If I had another watch with me I would have given it to him.  I still think about that on occasion and wish I had given it to that kid.  I think when I bought my Marlin, they were $39.  That young fellow most likely would have cherished the Casio the rest of his life (as I will).  Maybe I need another ride in Colombia.  If I go again I’ll throw an extra Marlin in one of the panniers.  You know, just to be prepared.

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Bond. Titanium Bond.

A watch is a personal and emotional purchase, much like a motorcycle or a rifle.   By definition, whatever you choose is perfect and the best; what anyone else chooses is not and is somehow indicative of a deep-seated character flaw.  I get that.

Having said that, I never got the attraction of an Omega wristwatch.  I know some folks love them and if you wear an Omega, more power to you.  It’s just not me, which is why I found the attractive young lady pushing the latest Omega at me amusing.

Omega, you see, never misses a marketing opportunity, and their latest product placement achievement is the new Bond movie, No Time To Die.  In it, 007 wears a titanium Omega Seamaster. The high end watch store in Palo Alto had a couple of the titanium Bond Omegas in stock, and the young sales lady was attempting what could only be described as a hard sell.  She was new to these shores, I think, and evidently convinced that if James Bond wore a titanium Omega, every man in America would want one as well.

“Bond wears,” she kept repeating, as if that was all it would take to get me to plunk down $9800 for an Omega (it would actually take a lot more, like maybe a $9700 discount).  Before I realized it, she had unbuckled my Casio Marlin (the best deal in a dive watch ever and one I wear frequently), and she had the titanium Bond on my wrist.  She would have made a good pickpocket.

“Bond wears,” she said again.

I wondered if she realized Bond is a fictional character.

The titanium Seamaster was light, almost like a plastic watch.  I could barely detect its presence.  I didn’t care for the look of the mesh bracelet, but damn, that thing was a feather.

“NATO Bond,” she said, pushing another titanium Bond Seamaster at me, this one with a cloth NATO band.  NATO watchbands…that’s another fad I never fell for.  They look cheap.  I was in the US Army and the only special watchbands I ever saw were the velcro bands paratroopers wear (they tear away if your watch gets caught on the door when exiting an aircraft…you lose your watch but you get to keep your arm, which isn’t a bad deal if you think about it).  I’m pretty sure guys in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization don’t actually wear NATO bands, but what do I know?

I like the look of a dive watch and I own a couple of them.  My tastes run toward high quality and low cost, so my personal favorites are the Casio Marlin (a watch I’ve written about before) and a Seiko Batman I bought at Costco a few years ago.  The Marlin was $39, it keeps superb time, it looks good, and it works well (it’s the watch I wore when I rode through Colombia).  The Marlin did just fine in the Andes’ torrential rains.  I’ve never tried the Marlin in the deep blue sea, though.  I’m not a diver and I really don’t know how well it would work as a dive watch.  But I’m not a fictional British secret agent, either, so unlike Daniel Craig I don’t need the titanium Bond watch.  If I need external inspiration, I’ll take it elsewhere. Bill Gates wears a Casio Marlin and even though he doesn’t have a blog or a motorcycle, he’s real and he seems to have done okay.  But I don’t need to emulate other people.  I just wear watches I find appealing.

I asked the young sales lady where she was from and she said Cupertino.  No, originally, I asked.  “China,” she said.  I asked where and she told me (it was a city in Hebei Province), I told her I had been there, and we chatted about the ride Gresh and I did across China.  She told me I had been to more places in China than she had.  I wore a Timex on that ride, I told her, like Napoleon Solo in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (the Chinese guys called me Dàshū, which means “big uncle,” so it sort of fit).  She laughed, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t know what I was talking about. Sometimes that makes for the best conversations.

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Watch this…

My name is Joe and I’m a watchaholic.

It started for me when I was a kid and my parents bought me a Timex, and it’s never subsided.   I can’t walk by a watch store or jewelry counter without stopping.  Watch technology has jumped through several advances in my lifetime, and I’ve enjoyed them all.  I like digital and I like analog watches, and I like that different watches work best for different applications (it gives me an excuse for buying one that, you know, I might need).  I like the idea that I can order a watch from overseas that’s not marketed here in the US, and I like a lot of the watches that are marketed here.  I travel overseas on a fairly regular basis, so I’m a sucker for a good-looking GMT watch (they’re the ones that allow you to see the time in two or three different places in the world simultaneously).  I’ll do another blog about the GMTs at a later date.   The focus of today’s blog is ride-specific watches.  I tend to think of watches by major motorcycle adventures, and there are three I want to mention today.

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The first one I’ll mention is the green-faced, military-styled Seiko I wore on the Western America Adventure Ride.  It’s a quartz watch and it’s not a model that was imported by Seiko’s US distributor (which doesn’t mean much these days; I ordered it new from a Hong Kong-based Ebay store and it was here in two days).  But I like the fact that I’ve never seen anybody else wearing this model.

I bought the Seiko on an Ebay auction about 15 years ago, and I think I got it for something like $52 brand new.  I like the style, I like its relative light weight, and I like the size (it’s the right size, not ridiculously-large like many watches today).  The Seiko is impervious to wet weather and it has served me well.   Just for grins, I tried to find it again on the Internet, and I only found one that was used in an Ebay auction, and it had already been bid up to over double what I paid for mine new.  You might be wondering about the compass directions on the Seiko’s bezel.  There’s a method of using those, the watch hands, and the sun to identify which way is north.  I don’t need that feature, I don’t use it, and I’d have to read the directions to learn it again, but it’s cool to know it’s there.  It’s kind of an Indiana Jones thing, I guess.

Next up is the safety-fluorescent-green Timex Ironman I wore on the ride across China.  I’d seen one at a Target department store and for reasons it would probably take a behavioral psychologist to explain, I decided it was one I had to have on the China ride. Gresh arrived in California a few days before we left for the China adventure, and we spent a good chunk of our pre-departure time running around to several different stores trying to find that watch.  Maybe I thought it would match my riding jacket.  Maybe I thought it would be good because you can light up the face at night (a feature that is very useful for finding your way to the latrine at night).  Like I said…who knows?  The Timex did a good job for me.   It was bitter cold up on the Tibetan Plateau, hot in the Gobi Desert, hot and humid everywhere else, and it rained so hard at times I swore I saw a guy leading animals two-by-two into a Chinese ark.  My Ironman is still going strong on the original battery.  Those Ironman watch batteries seem to last forever.

The last one is a Casio Marlin diver’s watch.  It has to be one of the best watch deals ever.  I’m  not a diver, and there are really no features (beyond telling time, luminescent hands, a rotating bezel, and a waterproof case) that I need, but I just like the thing.   You can get a brand new Casio Marlin for a scosh under $50, and folks, that’s a smoking good deal.

It rained like hell half the time we rode in Colombia, and the Casio never let me down.  I vividly remember waiting for the ferry to arrive in Magangué for our cruise down the Magdelana River to Mompos when a Colombian boy came over to see what we were all about.  He fixated on my Casio as we waited in sweltering heat under the shade of a very small tree.  He finally touched the watch and simply said “good.”   You know, I needed that watch on the trip (it was the only one I had with me), but if I had a spare, I would have given it to him.  I still wear the Casio regularly.  It’s just a good, basic, comfortable, and easy to read watch.  It’s a favorite.

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