Casio G-Shock GW-7900B-1

Seventeen years in the Coast Guard. Eight of those in a Port Security Unit, the rest at a heavy weather small boat station. Retired now, working toward going full time with a fire department, and part of that road ran through becoming an EMT. This is him headed back from the hospital. He bought the G-Shock GW-7900B-1 at the exchange years ago, before his first deployment. It is the watch that made him a watch guy. Then he came home, it got set aside, and nicer watches took its place. It came back out of the seabag for this job because it is rugged, dependable, bomb proof and solar powered. What he did not expect was the metaphor. In his words, his career started small and unsuspecting and grew, took him to bigger and different places, not necessarily better, and is responsible for where he is today. Then the world threw a curveball, the way it does, and all you can do is fall back on the skills you have always had. The ones you had when you started. Same as the watch. Which watch made you a watch guy? If you have a wrist shot from somewhere that matters, submit at the link in bio. Tempus Est Potentia.

Intel Report

Casio G-Shock GW-7900B-1 The G-7900 arrived in 2009 as Casio's rescue G-Shock, and the brief shows in the hardware. Oversized buttons meant to be worked with gloves on, a display rated to keep running down to minus 20 Celsius, 200 metres of water resistance, and a tide graph and moon data on the face for people whose working day is set by the water. The GW-7900B is the solar and radio version of that watch. Tough Solar runs it off light, and Multi Band 6 pulls a time calibration signal from six transmitters worldwide, so it corrects itself without being asked. Casio rates it at roughly nine months of running in the dark on a full charge. A Port Security Unit is one of the Coast Guard's deployable specialized forces, an expeditionary outfit built to secure ports and waterways away from home. From 2007 the PSUs sat under the Deployable Operations Group, and when that command was stood down on 1 October 2013 its units were re-sorted under Deployable Specialized Forces, which is the arrangement today. A heavy weather small boat station is a different job entirely, standing surf and weather on one fixed patch of coast.

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