Which is the most useless watch complication?
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For example, there's no point me getting up at 4am to hunt red deer on the tops or river flats in the dawn hours if it was a full moon last night, nor would hanging about in the twilight hours be fruitful, as the deer don't risk dawn/dusk when it's a full moon, they wait in cover for it to rise, then feed by its light. Come dawn, they've already moved back into their thermal cover to have a snooze.
When I was starting out, it took me about four fruitless hunts to make the connection, w the first experienced hunter I discussed it with laughed at my painful learning curve.
Fishing, I'm not familiar with, but I know the phase of the Moon is important also, not sure if it's gravity/tides related or light.
Doesn't take very much planning, my kit is set up for grab and go, and the beauty of living on a long but thin island is I'm driving anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours at most to reach the mountains where the deer are, so I can get a hunt in by driving up after work, and be back early afternoon, or sometimes just by setting my alarm for 3:30am and still be back in time to make a coffee before stand-up.
But I'd especially love the moon phase on my watch because the number of times my ADHD arse has gotten excited about weather conducive to deer movement and headed off into the hills without checking the moon is too many to count, and cellphone coverage is largely nil once you hit the front ranges.
Moon-rise/moon-set are good to know for other phases, as it gives you an idea of when the red deer (generally browsers in the forest, but they come out onto the grassy river flats after the spring flush, and onto the tops from late summer onwards) are likely to move from/to their bush cover to the feeding grounds around those times. If the shooting light overlaps with the rise or set of the Moon, there's a window of opportunity.
But yeah, it's a niche use-case.
(Re: conducive weather - a good nor'west rain/windstorm for a couple of days will see them very eager to feed as they tend to stay put in thermal cover during shithouse weather, and a clear cold frosty night after a few days of a cold southerly weather pattern (cold air, clouds, rain/snow) means you'll often find them heading to clearings that catch the early morning sun, and they're a lot easier to spot then. While they're very good at standing still to avoid detection, their condensing breath in the cold air isn't, and the lateral lighting at that time of morning makes the movement of the cloud even easier to see in binos)
HM&C took their Swiss Alp, a square watch with a tourbillion and minute repeater, and removed the hands. The only way to tell the time is with the minute repeater.
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/h-moser-swiss-alp-watch-co...
(A tourbillion claims to increase the accuracy of a mechanical watch by compensating for gravity's pull in the mechanism. A minute repeater is a bell which rings to indicate the current hour and quarter-hour so you can tell the time in the dark before electricity was invented.)
Yes, this is a joke watch, making fun of both the Apple Watch and the luxury watch industry.
There were digital watches with this feature sold by Optimum Time and Gill, but they have been unavailable since 2021 or so: https://www.tradeinn.com/bikeinn/en/gill-race-watch/1330814/...
I tried using a Garmin smart watch instead. It had a race start app, but it was way more fiddly than a non-smart race watch, to the point of not being usable for serious racing.
So while I would never buy the Yachtmaster, I appreciate its dedication to a function which is essential to racing sailors and poorly supported by other makers.
My current setup is:
- UV index
- Temperature (with daily high/low range)
- Day of week
- Day
- Next calendar item
- Air quality index (AQI)
- Current weather/anticipated rain
- Spotify shortcut
- Heart rate shortcut (doesn't display HR)
- Silent mode/notification status
Unpopular opinion: The second hand is generally useless in everyday life apart from short duration timing where a stopwatch would be superior. And it leads to unnecessary distraction by motion pollution in the visual field.
A sweeping second hand is handy for doing heart rate and respirations per minute, as you can just watch for 15 seconds, which is also mathematically and visually the same as the second hand sweeping 90 degrees, which is easy to dial in and count at the same time.
By multiplying these 15-second biometrics by 4, which is easy mental math. You also save the other 45 seconds per reading per patient over time.