Casio Sea-Pathfinder SPF40-1V Wrist Watch

Author's Rating:  

Finally received my watch. At first it was not delivered and Amazon kindly offered to send a replacement. Thankfully my freight forward finally managed to locate it, about a month later.

I got this watch to accompany me for my kayaking and fishing.

Anyhow, the watch works as advertised. The watch is actually lighter that it looks, though it does look rather chunky on my wrist. Chunky is good! It arrived in a "Auto Display" mode, so that means it'll be switching screens around and you won't be able to do anything else until you turn it off. Look out for a little blue instruction sheet tucked inside the manual to deactivate the auto display. Getting up and started is relatively easy, just follow the booklet and all will be over in about 10 minutes or so.

As another user has commented, its a little off from the tide readings, about an hour or so be generally still gives you a good tidal indication. Barometer and temperature works best if its not on your hand for awhile and allowing it to cool to the ambient temperature. The barometer was spot on when I got it, it rained not long after it detected a drop in barometric pressure.

Overall, would recommend for this watch for the price range that it is in. Its functions and its data gives you a good indication of weather and tide. So have fun with it, I'm off kayaking with my new toy.!
Aug 29, 2008

Author's Rating:  

This is an excellent watch for outdoorsy types, especially for those who sail, kayak or surf. With a compass, barometer, thermometer, and tide/moon tracking, it provides essential (potentially life-saving) information in an easy to use package.

The compass is seems accurate and is easy to calibrate. It is ideally suited for emergency navigation and for casual use such as trail hiking and river boating. I'm not sure I'd want to use it as my only compass for serious hiking or over the horizon boating, but perhaps that's just my distrust of electronics in mission critical environments.

The barometer is a little more hit-or-miss. It's accuracy is questionable given its fluctuation with altitude or temperature. This is not a Casio problem - it happens with all barometers especially wrist-mounted. Despite these issues the barometrer does a fair job of tracking the trend over the last 24 hours. Serious moutaineers may miss the multi-day tracking and using the barometer as altimeter, but most will appreciate it for the simple data it provides. I wish there were more display options, like a large multiday graph option for instance, but the small graph is fine.

Temp fluctuates when this is worn on the wrist, but not too much - perhaps a couple of degrees hotter than true outside temperature. It may be less accurate in cold temperatures than hot, but I'll have to wait a few months to test that theory.

The tide and moon features are what make this watch unique among triple-sensor watches, so I imagine that will be a key selling point for most. Both work well enough, though they will not replace a tide chart. The tide graph shows the general point in the cycle, but not with great accuracy. It's really only possible to estimate high tide with an hour or two. It would be nice of the actual hightide time were displayed or at least the graph had greater specificity. The moon tracking is a nice touch, since it allows one to estimate the size of the tides (spring and neap). But it's only an estimate - the watch does not tie moon and tide data together, leaving it to the user to figure it out. Some other tide watches actually have charts built-in that provide much more accurate data for particlar beaches, but are limited to limited spots. Since the Casio use longitude and other data to estimate the tide, it is less accurate for specific spots but more usefull overall. The ability to forcast the moon phase days in the future, but not to do the same for tide, leaves me wondering what they were thinking.

Other features of the watch include a countdown timer, stopwatch, and five alarms, which are all just fine. The five alarms cannot be set by day, but I suppose if you want to set a time for each day and just activate it as necessary that does the job. If you use the stopwatch and coundown timers frequently you may find switching between the two annoying, since they use the same function (you just set the the countdown timer to zero to put it in stopwatch mode). Also there are no lap-timers.

Downsides to the watch basically boil down to compleixity and size. While the watch is pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it, it is not entirely intuitive an all screens, and requires some memorization. Setting the tide data requires far too much research on the internet, and casio should provide better data either in the manual or on their website about how to set the data for most large coastal cities and popular recreation areas. The size of the watch is HUGE. It is larger even than the Suunto watches with similar features. The biggest annoyance I have with the size is the height, which is made unnecisarily taller by the rotating bezel. But for some the size won't matter (some may like it) so it is really a matter of taste.

Overall the eatch offers a great set of tools for most casual uses and does it at a very reasonable price. I recommend it to casual adventurers unconcerned about the size.
Aug 05, 2007