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!
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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.
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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.
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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.