Arsenal SURF

We’ve been wearing the Rip Curl “Rincon” Oceansearch tide watch for nearly two years now and so far we give it a thumbs up.  The watch has become a valuable surf tool in regards to tides and time.  We’ve abused the heck out of the thing and done a poor job of rinsing it in fresh water as recommend and only two things have gone wrong: 1) one of the buttons started to stick and was fixed under warranty, 2) the black rip curl logo wore off.

Waterproofness:  We’ve surfed this in just about every session over the last 2 years, over 350 sessions and it was built tough for most of the time.  We’ve done some other watersports with it; kayaking, wave runners, snorkeling, etc also.  Eventually one of the buttons started to get crusted with salt from our lack of rinsing it and this became and issue.  Additionaly the watch started to fog up inside. Rip Curl recommend replacing the seals every two years and this was just short of two years.  See more under the Warranty section.

Tides:  It has something like 15-20  years of programmed data for 200 beaches. The data for Rincon is spot on with what you see at tidelines.com.  It comes pre-set with Rincon tides and is much better than the calendars that you have to add or subtract time to to adjust from LA tides.  It was the easiest to read tide watch in our research, with the time of the next tide, the height, and the direction it’s heading. Very easy.

Bummers

• Button Placement: The buttons on the right are swapped from how most watches are. This can be annoying as the stop/start button is in the upper right and the lap/reset button is in the lower right. This only annoying when you are doing the stopwatch or the countdown timer.
• Buttons Sticking:  If you aren’t good about rinsing the watch off with fresh water (and we never purposefully rinsed it), the buttons can stick from saltwater build up.  In the first 1.5 years this only happened a few times and could be fixed with a rinse.  However with only a few months left in our 2 year warranty one of the buttons was permanently stuck and we sent it in for warranty repair.

Warranty Repair: We held off on writing a review until we had it for a few years to see how it weathered some abuse. It did quite well considering the hostile ocean environment and the sheer amount of sessions it took. As written above it was sent back just short of two years to repair some sticky buttons and internal moisture from lack of rinsing.  We imagine this wouldn’t have happened if we had rinsed it after surfing or surfed a lot less over the last two years.  .

Summary: The Rip Curl Rincon Oceansearch gets the thumbs up. It has a few user interface quirks, but it is a stout oceangoing tide watch we thing deserves a purchase.