Casio G-Shock Gulfmaster GWN-1000B-1B

Great Functions but a Total Disappointment – This is a great watch if you spend a lot of time by the sea or in the mountains. All the functions are accurate and useful. Unfortunately the watch leaks like a sieve. Even washing your hands is too much for it and it fogs up. Complementing this, the second hand binds and will not move. This is more than just an irritation as it is used for reading off with some of the functions. A search on the internet suggests that both of these problems seem to be common issues with this watch.

It gets worse if you live in Australia. Casio's agent in here is one of those organisations that hide behind the anonymity of the answer phone, the email address, and has no shopfront. Posting your watch to them for repair is like casting it into a black hole: they don't even acknowledge they have received it. Unfortunately you have to deal with these people as horologists will not touch Gulfmasters. Apparently they are a real stinker to work on and parts are hard to get.

All in all this is not acceptable with a watch which costs around $700 new. Best not buy one and avoid all Casio products until Casio in Japan lights a fire under their Australian agent.

Useful For Those Who Spend Time In The Sea & Hikers – Fishermen, surfers, sailors & hikers will appreciate the functions the Gulfmaster offers. Not only does this watch display the tide status of a location you pre-select, but with the push of a button it will show the future tides at hourly intervals, so you can guesstimate what time to be on the water for a particular tide. For those interested in Neap & Spring tides, the watch can be set to display the current moon phase status on the LCD. For instance, Day 1 would indicate a new moon; Day 7 a half moon waxing; Day 14 would be a full moon; Day 21 a half moon waning; Day 28 a new moon again, etc. Unlike my old Ripcurl watch, there is no dedicated dial to indicate Spring & Neap & in between. The Barometer function is useful for those who like to keep an eye on incoming weather in case you've got to head for shelter. In the Barometer setting, you can set the second hand to act as a barometer needle, which will move when the air pressure changes & is easily read by the large numbers on what looks like the watch's bezel. A small digital graph on the LCD displays the readings over the last 22 hours. The Temperature & Altitude functions are a disappointment & a waste of time. You have to take your watch off for 20 minutes & put it in a shady spot for it to give an accurate temperature reading, which no one would really do. The Altitude is never accurate since it works on air pressure so if over the day as the barometric pressure changes, you seem to get wildly varying readings. It's a shame, really. At the start of the day my home might read 11m altitude, but at the end of the day it might indicate my home is -95m! The compass is great & I like the solar charging. The watch can be a bit technical to set up & change Daylight Savings Time plus if you don't use certain functions regularly you might be pushing buttons all over the place, like me sometimes, to get it to do what you want it to do. There's always the manual to fall back on. It's also got 5 alarms, stopwatch, timer. The small LCD display is silver characters on a black background - however, I think black characters on white background might have been an easier to read design.