Deep-sea Diver

[Thora Buckner]

Introducingthe G-Shock CasiOak Deep Sea Diver, where horological toughness meets detailed pictorial artistry. Inspired by the legacy of luxury diver watches, this wearable art is not just a timepiece, but a companion for every diver, a narrative of ocean mysteries, and a tribute to the artistry of watchmaking.

Distinctive and hand-painted, no two dials are alike.

Limited to 100 pieces worldwide.

The retired Army master sergeant was the guest speaker at the Martin Luther King Jr. observance Jan. 19 at the Lee Theater. She spoke in front of a few hundred people, including CASCOM and Fort Lee commanding general Maj. Gen. Mark T. Simerly, whom she has known 30 for years.

To graduate, students were required to pass a health and fitness assessment that disqualified many. Other course challenges included requirements to rise from a seated position wearing the 198-pound Mark V deep sea dive suit, walking to a ladder, descending into the water and climbing back up. In the end, Crabtree was one of only two Soldiers and nine Sailors to earn the coveted diver badge.

Although Crabtree had accomplished what no female Soldier had in the predominately white, male career field, there would be no confetti drop. It became clear from her first assignment at Fort Belvoir.

Leveille defied what many thought was his role in pushing Crabtree out of the career field, she said. Instead, he turned out to be no more or less than a hard-but-fair Soldier who took care of his troops no matter what and who was ready to challenge anyone questioning his leadership.

Deciding some of the actions directed against her were discriminatory, Crabtree filed complaints with her chain of command, the post inspector general, the specialized training branch sergeant major and the Department of the Army inspector general.

That was 1985. Crabtree finished out her career as a signal Soldier. Over the course of leaving dive duty, her indignation has grown into debilitating discontent, consuming every corner of her consciousness.

Crabtree, who was accompanied by her service dog Buddy during the speech, said she could accept people resisting her for breaking new ground but has had difficulty reconciling why she was ill-treated.

Now living in the Augusta, Georgia area, Crabtree said she has spent considerable time trying to heal as a result of what she experienced in the Army. Engagements such as the Fort Lee MLK event at which she spoke have helped.

After the speech, Crabtree spoke with Soldiers and many were thankful she shared her story. One interaction with an officer was notable and even haunting because it proved to be powerfully restorative, if only in a small way.

Technical diving is a more complex, and challenging, form of scuba diving. Technical divers rely on specialized training, equipment, and mixed gases to safely descend beyond the recreational limit to depths that can exceed 90 meters (300 feet).

Closed-circuit diving uses the same gases, but the equipment is more complex. It relies on a closed-circuit rebreather, which includes multiple hoses and cylinders, computers, sensors, and a "scrubber" canister, to circulate the breathing gas in a closed loop. This system removes carbon dioxide from expelled breaths, balances the mix of gases so the diver is always breathing the desired blend based on depth, and recirculates the scrubbed and mixed gas back to the diver. Thus, closed-circuit divers recycle much of the gas they breathe.

During ascent and decompression, an open-circuit diver switches from the cylinders on their back to a cylinder attached to their side (a stage bottle) containing a mix of gases more appropriate at shallower depths. This mix is often enriched with higher concentrations of oxygen (enriched air, or Nitrox) that aids in the off-gassing of nitrogen. While closed-circuit divers may carry a stage bottle as backup, their onboard system adjusts the gas mix and increases the oxygen concentration as the depth decreases.

These systems enable divers to reach greater depths and spend more time underwater. However, they require considerable training, dive planning, and redundancies. To prepare for the possibility of a malfunction underwater, technical divers also dive with backup equipment, such as extra masks, computers, lights, and regulators attached to alternate air sources.

Technical diving lets us explore, document, and monitor shipwrecks and other maritime heritage sites, up close, and sometimes hands on, helping us better uncover and understand our past. It expands our abilities to study marine life not found in shallower water in real time and deploy, maintain, repair, and recover scientific instruments to collect data over time, helping us better understand our ocean and how to sustain it for future generations.

Once again we return to our So You Want My Job series, in which we interview men who are employed in desirable jobs and ask them about the reality of their work and for advice on how men can live their dream.

Manual, unglamorous labor and tasks ranging from the most strenuous grunt-work to the installation and repairs of relatively technical instrumentation and just about everything in between. If it can be done above water, at some point it will need to happen underwater.

Sometimes the travelling and living on a boat or in a hotel can get old if it goes on for a long time without a break. Being cold can suck. Divers that wear all the deep-sea diver t-shirts and belt buckles and turn the job into their only identity can be kind of comical.

Until now, most of those customized pieces have seen a colorful blast of abstract patterned dials or enhancement concentrated solely on the large and prominent indices of the stock model. The CasiOak Deep Sea Diver is the first creation from IFL Watches, which departs from the abstract and moves firmly towards a detailed and naturalistic image. Each hand-painted dial shows an underwater seascape complete with its own little diver immersed in the tranquillity of the ocean.

The base layer of color is more than just a backdrop, though. The paint has a shimmering pearlized effect, most noticeable on the chapter ring. The dial is then flecked with white and turquoise to give the impression of marine life in the depths and sea foam above. As another departure from the original GM-2100CB-1A reference, the large indices and bezel markings are painted white to represent the crest of breaking waves. Despite most modifications concentrating on the artistic and poetic, the decision to highlight the bezel markings swims against the tide and gives this true tool watch more usability.

I appreciate the concept of the hand painted dial in a limited edition run. But nearly 1200 Euros for a base Casioak is just too much! If it sold for about half that amount, it would still be pricey, but more understandable.

All, good, this is a very special customised/modified version of the CasiOak by IFL Watches. Casio remains the same and he will not be priced out. The intricate hand-painted dial is very labor intensive here and the price reflects the artisanal craft.

Believe it works a bit like the Chrono Chime and the Daytona. Not breadwinners, they are there to legitimise pricing of the levels below. Casio drops a few goodies, intentionally below levels of demand. Justifies a small turn of the pricing screw, but what they really want is for those to keep up the demand by volume. Expenses in one end, revenue i a different.

A MARTNEZ, HOST: It's easy to dream about space because all you got to do is go outside and look up to see some of what's out there. But the deep ocean - that's not so easy. Because even if you're in the ocean, you can't just look down and see what's in the deep waters.SUSAN CASEY: Typically, it's defined as the waters below 600 feet. So, as you can imagine, since it goes all the way down to almost 36,000 feet in places, the deep ocean is the vast, vast, vast majority of the ocean.MARTNEZ: Susan Casey has been down there. She's a diver and author of the new book "'The Underworld: Journeys To The Depths Of The Ocean." Casey writes that while most people prefer to go to Paris, Bora Bora or the Serengeti, she's always wanted to go to the ocean's abyss.CASEY: If you think of the Earth as a biosphere, but 2% of that is everything we see, 98% is ocean, and 95% of that is deep ocean. And I often think of it as, like, living in some mansion filled with rooms full of amazing animals and artworks and treasures. And we've just looked in one or two rooms. I really wanted to look in all of the rooms.MARTNEZ: What's the deepest you've been? I read that you went 16,000 feet deep, right?CASEY: It was somewhere between 16 and 17, probably closer to 17,000 feet deep. Yes.MARTNEZ: Oh, I'm so sorry - 17,000.CASEY: Yeah. Listen, there's a lot more below that. But I was very happy to get to that depth because what I was really hoping - when I set out to do this project, it was my greatest hope and dream that I would be able to take readers with me to a really profound depth in the ocean, and that's the literal abyss. And it was a magnificent experience, just real honor to be able to share that with everybody.MARTNEZ: So, OK, aside from what we typically think we know about what's there, what's there?CASEY: Well, that is a question that's always haunted me. Ever since I started writing about the ocean, I began to notice that there's this parallel universe that pops to the surface every so often, but then it'll disappear again, and we can't really follow it. And there is so much going on down there - a lot of really extraordinary life, a lot of lost history that we are rediscovering. So it's a party down there.MARTNEZ: Well, let me ask you this then. Why don't we seem to care as much about that party as we do about this party above our head - space?CASEY: I've thought about that a lot, and I still do think about that a lot. And I think it's just out of sight, out of mind. I mean, we can look up in the sky. We can look at the stars through telescopes. But the journey inward is a journey into darkness. It's a journey into a sort of an inner space that makes us less comfortable. It's not a journey of conquest. It's really one of submission.MARTNEZ: In the course of human history, all the shipwrecks, all the stuff that's been thrown in the ocean, I'm wondering just how much manmade stuff is out there.CASEY: UNESCO has estimated that there are some 3 million undiscovered shipwrecks. Now, not all of those are in the deep ocean. But what's interesting is that when there is a shipwreck in the deep ocean, it's often really well-preserved. But - I don't know if you had a chance to read the book, but there is a chapter about marine archaeology in there, and it focuses on this one shipwreck that's really fascinating that they're going to do a full excavation on at 2,000 feet down. It's called the San Jose, and it's a really unusual shipwreck because they know that it's been preserved perfectly in the seafloor sediment, and it also is filled to the gills with stuff.MARTNEZ: Oh, wow.CASEY: And its value is estimated at somewhere between 17 billion to 35 billion just in the stuff that's on it. But it's got this absolutely priceless historic value because they know exactly what it was doing, where it went down. And the problem is is that the excavation is going to cost upwards of $50 million, and it - there becomes this sort of battle of, OK, who's going to pay for this and who will own it? But that's the kind of thing that's down there.MARTNEZ: You know, that makes me think of the Titan submersible. How can deep sea exploration coexist with deep sea tourism?CASEY: Well, any time you go into the deep ocean, you're not really a tourist. I mean, because it's a fairly extreme experience. And the thing about the Titan that is so distressing is that it really is an accident, a tragedy, that didn't have to happen because we're talking about forces that we know what they are and we know how to engineer to withstand them. There's just a tried and true way of getting down there that they disregarded. And unfortunately, the tragedy resulted.MARTNEZ: In the book, you speak to many of the people that are down there often, that have seen things that no one can possibly imagine. Who are some of these people, and what are they most afraid of when it comes to what we don't know about the ocean and the deep ocean?CASEY: One of the scientists that I write about is Alan Jamieson, who specializes in a - the deepest region of the ocean, which is called the hadal zone after Hades, the god of the underworld. And there are really unusual creatures down there. And they caught this one little crustacean in the Mariana Trench. And when they took it back to sequence it genetically, they discovered that it wasn't fully organic. There was nanoplastics and little micro bits of plastic actually embedded into its organs throughout its body. So it was a sort of a hybrid plastic-organic creature.MARTNEZ: Wow.CASEY: And they named it Eurythenes plasticus because they caught a lot of these, and they could not find one that did not have plastic incorporated into its body. And so when I asked Alan, OK, so how many other hybrid plastic-organic creatures are there down there? And he just looked at me and said, all of them. So there is a sense that even though it's the most remote and the most difficult to access environment, that this is a small planet and we have an impact even on the farthest reaches of the deep ocean.MARTNEZ: Susan, what have you learned from visiting the depths of the ocean that maybe can tell us something about life here, up at the surface?CASEY: One of the things that I think is really required for ocean exploration and for dealing with the ocean in general - you need a certain humility that I think would really serve us well to adopt a little bit more in our doings in the terrestrial world. You cannot stand in front of a 70-foot wave, you cannot descend into the abyssal depths of the ocean and think, hey, we're in charge here. We've got it covered. I mean, like, you will very quickly understand that there are forces much greater than we are, and we're not going to conquer them. We're not going to be able to somehow subdue four tons of pressure per square inch. You can only really go there with a real sense of humility. And I think humility, in general, is very undervalued as a superpower.MARTNEZ: Susan Casey wrote "The Underworld: Journeys To The Depths Of The Ocean." Susan, thanks.CASEY: Thank you.(SOUNDBITE OF AMERICAN AVENUE SONG, "OCEAN EYES (A CAPPELLA)")

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