Introducing The Bower Tide Seeker

Let me take you back 21 years to 2004. Facebook had just launched, Usher’s ‘Confessions’ album just launched, and ten new countries just joined the European Union.

It was a hell of a year, but one that was uneventful for me until one day in late November. I was an awkward 14-year-old and in an attempt to fit in with the cool kids at my beach-side high school, I took up surfing. Noosa Main beach was my classroom and my teacher was a retired Hawaiian man that sold board shorts out of his garage (seriously).

First point is the name of the surf break I was at that day, sitting on my longboard waiting for the grumpy locals to let me catch a wave. It was a peaceful day from what I remember, and I sat there bobbing up and down in the waves as I noticed the crowd thinning out, ’it’s my turn for a wave now’ I thought. Until this point, I was consistently falling off my board on every wave, but all of a sudden, I noticed the water slowly sinking as a wave swelled up behind me. “One more” I thought to myself as I started to paddle for it. The stars aligned and for the first time I felt what it was like to be an actual surfer. My board glided down the wave as the sun sparkled off the water in front of me. I rode that slab of fibreglass all the way in and stepped off onto the sand like Jack Sparrow stepping off his sinking boat. Smooth.

Little did I know, my board short selling teacher had been yelling at me to get out of the water for the last five minutes. With pure terror in his eyes, he told me that there was an eight-foot-long hammer head shark swimming around while I was waiting for a wave. He thought I saw it and surfed all the way in, but was shocked when I told him I was blissfully unaware of the apex predator lurking beneath me. That night, I sat on the beach with my friends, watching the tide turn and swallow up more and more of the sand in front of us. I was happy to have all of my limbs, and even happier that I had finally learnt how to surf. The next week was spent on dry land to let my nerves settle, but subsequently, I was back on the board.

What Is The Bower Tide Seeker?

Why am I telling you about my close encounter with death/ my perfect wave? Well, because I want to give you some background on why the watch I’m talking about here interests me so much. I spent my entire teens in or around the ocean, I learnt the intricacies of how it behaves, what to watch out for and when to avoid it. Every morning I would check the tides before I went surfing, fishing or for a walk on the beach with my girlfriend. The inwards and outwards ‘breath’ of the tide lead my days. I was obsessed. So when I met Syl and Roger from Bower and saw their first watch, the Tide Seeker, at a watch event late last year, I connected with them immediately.  

The Tide Seeker isn’t a watch that I would usually be drawn to, at around $500 AUD, it’s well below the price point of the watches I usually write about. But it’s tide tracking movement and total humility brought me back to a time in my life that I miss. One where the only thing that mattered were the waves and the change of tide was the one thing I could rely on.

Let’s talk about the Bower Tide Seeker.

What Is A Semidiurnal Tide?

Before we get into the details, we have to understand what this watch tracks. A Semidiurnal tide is when you have two equal high tides and two equal low tides per lunar day (24 hours 50 mins). Different topographical conditions dictate what kind of tides occur at a particular location, but semidiurnal is the most common and what the Tide Seeker is tracking here. Got it? Good.

The Tide Seeker tracks this semidiurnal tide using a large central hand that rotates once every 12 hours and 25 minutes (half a lunar day). It does this using a Swiss Ronda Semidiurnal Quartz movement (who knew that was a thing!?). At a glance, you know whether the tide is high, low, rising, or falling with the hand pointing to the corresponding marker on the periphery of the dial. It’s incredibly simple to read, and my god do I wish it existed when I was a kid. It’s precisely what I wanted when I was skipping school and bumming around on the beach. Sorry, mum…

Time telling is taken care of by a couple of pill shaped hour and minute hands, the latter of which is skeletonised, so the hour hand can be seen when it’s underneath. A really satisfying detail. The watch I chose is the white dial variant, which I didn’t love at first. The hour markers blend in with the white grained dial, and legibility seemed like it might be an issue. As soon as I wore it out in the sun, however, the Super-Luminova charged up and the whole thing came to life. It’s a very subtle dial in most situations but reminds you it means business when you go from sunshine to shade.

The only thing that could be improved upon with the Tide Seeker is the water resistance. At 100m it’s only just passable for surfing, and I suspect the pusher for the tide indication has something to do with it. If it had 200m of resistance, I would feel much more comfortable taking it with me into the ocean. In saying that, at this price point, I’m being a little pedantic. I mean, go and buy a nautilus, a supposed ‘sports’ watch, and you’re only getting 30m. I think my expectations are a bit out of whack these days. Too much salt in my brain.

'Tomorrow the sun will rise, who knows what the tide will bring.'

Bower Brings A Deep Connection To The Ocean

I have mine set to the tides of my old stomping ground, Noosa main beach in QLD, Australia. Although I’m now living a different life down in Melbourne, more ‘baby shark’ than hammerhead, it’s nice to feel connected to a place that bought me so much comfort when I was a kid.

The Tide Seeker isn’t an expensive watch, it doesn’t have immaculate mirror polishing or a complex mechanical movement. What it is though, is a humble, approachable and practical tool for people that like to get outside and live their lives in or around the ocean. For those of us that no longer have that privilege, however, the Tide Seeker keeps us connected to the slow rise and fall of a past life lived well.

I’ll be wearing mine whenever I hear the waves calling my name.

Check out Bower HERE

Cya in the next one.

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