Hands On: Cressi Goa Freedive Watch Review
No fish was ever shot by a dive watch but many a diver is still alive thanks to their watch. Today we're reviewing the recently released Cressi Goa dual-mode dive watch. As a spearo there is little need for a watch with both apnea and scuba modes but at this price you're basically getting the scuba functionality for free!
The way we dive is very aggresive and when you're on the prowl you can rarely afford a 3:1 surface interval, this is why we encounter blackouts, and why a dive watch's surface interval timer is your most important peice of safety equipment. Blackouts are most commonly a result of oversaturation of CO2 in the blood stream, not a lack of oxygen, and the way we off-gas CO2 is through breathing, which is why serious freedivers maintain such high ration surface times. If you're down for a minute and up for 30 seconds you'll be building CO2 rapidly as you're not giving yourself enough time to dispel CO2. In a perfect world the fish would wait for us while we executed our surface interval but obviously this is not the case and this is where a dive watch becomes key as it allows us to ensure that we are taking enough time after back-to-back dives or deep dives. Until I had a dive watch I'd dive whenever I felt like it, now that i'm taking 3 surface minutes for ever 1 underneath I've realised I was never taking enough time on the surface between dives... eek.
The Goa is Cressi's first watch to include their new motherboard redundancy technique that, instead of just one connection, duplicates all connections as to minimise the chance of a critical failure on the motherboard. If you do have a failure on one of the hundreds of connections, there is still a backup connection and the chance of a failure to occur on the same connection twice is very, very low. Low to the point that if it did occur, it would almost certainly be a result of design, not use.
One can set alarms for surface time, dive time, depth and step and even when you need to wake up to hit your spot first.. wow, a clock alarm :O I often forget that this is still a watch, even though I wear it every day because it's compact and has the date on it. I've not had much use for depth alarms as I never dive down a rope, however it's been extremely valuable for when I've been operating cameras that have a maximum depth rating. I can see a lot of value in these alarms for the more technical free divers but for spearing I don't want any alarms ringing out because I'm a meter deeper than some arbitrary depth I'd set while on the surface...
Cressi Goa Dive Watch Features
- 49mm diameter
- Easy to read
- Compatible on PC or MAC
- User replaceable battery
- Alarm Clock
- Backlit
- Great for Multiday repeated compression diving
- 5 Year Warranty
- Display of all diving parameters.
- Depth - current and previous.
- Temperature - live and average in log.
- Maximum diving depth - current and previous.
- Current Dive Time.
- Previous Dive Time.
- Surface Interval timer.
- Length of diving session
- Surface time, maximum depth, step and bottom time alarms.
- Recovery time alarm.
- Clock time available during diving.
