Review Summary

So many breaks, if not all of them, are influenced greatly by the tide. Your local break can in the span of 12 hours turn from beauty to the beast all because mother nature is giving the waves more or less water in which to do their thing. As a surfer it's ultra-important to know what time you can expect a low or high tide. Freestyle, among others, have given us the ultra-convenient tide wacthes that store many years of tide data available to us at a quick glane to the wrist.

This watch is one of the more visible timepieces out there with Freestyle carving a niche for themselves as one of the bigger names in surf watches. The Shark Tide watch is a beefy watch built strong of quality materials. The band is thick rubber and the case is solid stainless steel; no cheap Wal-Mart special here. One thing noticed is that the buckle on the band is shaped in a way that makes threading the other strap a bit tricky until you get the hang of it. You might find yourself pinning the watch against something solid to allow an easier time putting the watch on instead of just doing it easily with your free hand. The band also seems to be built for smaller wrists. I'm an average sized guy with regular sized wrists and I only have 3 holes left before I'm out of space. This could be trouble if you have bigger wrists or if you choose to wear this over a thin neoprene jacket or wetsuit in the water. And I gotta ask: who has wrists small enough that you'd need the first 3 notches...might be handy for loping it on a backpack or belt-loop or something, I guess.

There are a ton of great features here like a countdown timer which is helpful for those competitive surfers battling against a clock but even more handy for the rest of us in situations where you're in a battle agaist the clock in the parking meter or the clock back at the office. The chronograph is your run of the mill chrono; nothing special here. There are 4 alarms which come in handy if you want to set the watch to let you know when your favorite break is at a certain tide among other things. There's a 2nd time setting and tide and future tide functions...more on those later. A very nice feature is when cycling through the various functions the watch beeps, but the best part is the beep for "time 1" (where your watch will spend 99.9% of its time) has a higher pitch letting you cycle to the time without a look. Kudos. The screen has a bright green film on it that when tilted correctly in regular light makes the face super easy to read. The blue light illuminates the watch face nicely at night.

The tide functionality is nice. One glance and you see a graphic LCD representation of the tides for the current day. By pressing a button you can have the graph displayed on the top half of the watch display in the "time 1" mode, which is very handy. Setting which tide to display is done by choosing from 15 different zones across the world holding 128 preset beaches. If your home break isn't on there (probably isn't) you create a custom beach with a name and an offset up to +/- 30 minutes of the closest beach which should be plenty of time to get your break dialed in. The future tide function allows you to find out the tide at a beach for any day in the next 15 years. In either tide mode you can move a line along the graph to show the next hour and the corresponding tide.

OK, here's some nit-picking with the tide functionality. The graph shows the up and down of the tide and there are tiny static #'s on the side lettng you know how high or low the tide is. But, I've noticed that the tide is always at 8' (the top end) and usually 0' or -2' on the bottom end. There is no way to display the hight of the tide, even if it's just the value for high and low. We know the data has been inputted in the watch, but there's no way to display it. Also there's no way to tell the exact time of the tides, which again, we know is in there. When you go to the "tide" mode you see the tide graph which can be shown on the "time 1" screen but the bottom half shows the date. What?! Who cares that it's June 27th 2004, tell me the height of the tide or the time at which the high or low tides occur! This is a big oversight from my point of view. Hopefully future versions of this good watch will include this seemingly critical functionality to make this watch a must-have in every surfers arsenal.

If you want to try out a tide watch this is a great place to start. Sure it has a couple quirks but overall this is a solid watch with great functionality, even if you look at it without the tide functions. Personally I'd prefer to know the exact times of the tides and the exact heights, but even an estimate of those times and heights of the tide is a hell of a lot better than the alternative which is nothing unless you have Internet access or a tide book on you, which is unlikely sitting in traffic or at a restaurant. This is a very good watch which deserves a look if you're in the market for a functional surf watch.

by - Bryan Mills

Learn more at http://www.freestyleusa.com