Land Diver Society

Being a gear guy, it can be hard for me to get excited over new gear. I have tried a bunch of knives, lights, pistols, watches, medical gear, and everything in between, and after a while a lot of it starts to blend together. This month, though, I have gotten some gear in that I am pretty excited about—things that genuinely have me looking forward to putting them to use.

We have six pieces of gear that I am excited to try out and give some love to: one knife, one light, four watches, plus an honorable mention. Each was brought into the rotation for a specific reason, and I have high hopes that a few of them will end up sticking around long term.

1. The Knife

One thing we are going to be doing over the month is updating our recommended gear page on the website. While looking at doing this, I have been trying to find a new knife to add as a recommendation alongside some of the classics that I have used and loved. I wanted a knife that had the opportunity to build a patina and used some classic materials such as leather, Micarta, copper, brass, etc.

Recently I stopped in to see the guys over at MKE Blades and, as I always do, talked their ears off. We got to talking and I mentioned that I was hoping to see one of the Benchmade Bugout 535FE-2602 models. It had the color combination I liked from my Benchmade Bailout, with Taiga Green but adding Micarta and an S90V blade. Overall, from the photos online, this thing just turned me on.

They were out of stock in the store, but one of the cool things about them being through Sherpers is that they were able to contact one of the other stores and get one in quickly. I left the store and went out to handle some other stuff I had going on that day. By the time I was wrapping that up, they called and told me they had gotten it in from the other store and I could come check it out.

I swung back into the store on my way home, checked it out, handed my card over, and home with me it came. This will be my E.D.C. knife to test over the next month, and from my initial impressions I can tell you it is likely going to be a winner.

2. Pilot’s Watch

During my initial break for September, I spent some time going through my watch collection, trying to shrink it down and deciding what I wanted to keep and what I didn’t. I am on a new focus of trying to keep a limited collection with a lot of stuff I actually want to wear often, while not letting my collection get so damned bloated with one specific style of watch. That opened up some opportunities to bring in watches that are not the normal styles for me.

I have a buddy, Theo, who is someone I consider an actual secondary-market dealer. He deals in a lot of watches that are in my price point and always seems to have things that are interesting to me. We were discussing what he had in stock, and he had a couple of pieces I had been looking at for a while but that, new, are a little above what I am willing to spend on a watch.

The biggest piece that stood out to me in his inventory was a Longines Spirit 37mm. The Spirit has always looked clean to me and seemed like a good option for a daily watch. It is refined while still holding onto the tool-watch DNA it is designed from. This thing has been fun and beautiful to wear, and I am excited to keep it going this month as I put it through its paces.

3. Did Someone See a Smurf Come Running In?

When I was younger there were two things I was obsessed with: space and explorers. Those interests shaped some of the roads and paths my life has taken. That made a space-exploration movie like Interstellar an absolute must-see for me. When it released in 2014, I was there for the early release and probably saw it in theaters 10 times because it was such a masterpiece and such a cool thing to me.

This was right around the time I originally started getting into watches, and I remember searching the depths of the internet to find out what watch was used in the movie. I was saddened to find out that, while Hamilton actually produced the watch for the movie, it was strictly a prop. Years later, when they announced that it was actually going to be produced, I contacted the only Hamilton A.D. locally at the time and got one on order.

I picked it up, and it was the 42mm black-dial version. At the time, this was a case of never meet your heroes. The watch wore large on my wrist, and the black dial just did not look good to me, so unfortunately it was a watch that I fairly quickly sold. I later gave the watch another shot in the black 38mm, and again, the plain black dial was just something I could not get over.

When Hamilton announced that they were going to be doing a Blue Gradient Dial Khaki Murph, I knew that I would be making one of these fit into the collection. While updating my collection, the perfect opportunity arose to make that happen. I needed a modern field watch in the collection, as the Marathon I had been using to fill this role is due for retirement after 26+ years of use in all sorts of environments.

I contacted one of our local E.D.C. shops, Wingman Gifts & Supply, which is a Hamilton A.D., to see if they had a Blue Murph in stock. Dewayne was very helpful and let me know they did. I dropped what I was doing and headed into the store to pick it up. A quick drive and exchange of funds later, this thing landed on my wrist. It is everything I was hoping it would be and is already proving to be a watch that will get a lot of wrist time and absolutely earn its keep.

4. Small, but Mighty

A focus of mine over the last few months has been finding gear that is smaller and easier to carry. My carry pistol has swapped over to a S&W Bodyguard 2.0. The Benchmade Bailout, and now the Bugout, are gracing my pocket often. With my light, however, I have still been carrying a larger light all the time in my Fenix LD30. I needed to find an option that would fit with where the rest of my gear has been heading.

Little did I realize I already had a couple of great options sitting in my E.D.C. case. I have had a blue and a green Olight i3T 2 EOS for probably six months to a year, sitting in my collection of lights and almost never seeing the light of day. Recently I pulled them out and have been slipping them into my pocket often.

They use a readily available battery, are compact, are plenty bright for my normal daily tasks, and come in a couple of very nice colors. Boom—home run, and I didn’t even need to pick up new gear. This really started to round out the final things I needed for a smaller, more compact on-body carry.

5. Overbuilt Tool That Laughs at You When You Think You’re Going to Hurt It

Dive watches are a great thing and are still my favorite style of watch, but a lot of them have started to get boring for me. Many look very similar in their design aesthetic, with not much really setting them apart from each other. This was evident when I opened up my watch case and, out of the 10 divers that were in the collection, eight of the 10 had very similar design language. That made me really start looking at other options.

Theo sent me a somewhat ambiguous message one day asking if I had ever tried Nodus before, along with photos of two Nodus Sector Deep models. I told him I hadn’t, but I had been watching them from afar and they seemed to be some badass pieces that were really blowing a lot of people away. A deal was struck, and the coolest piece in the Nodus lineup was on its way to me.

The Sector Deep has an awesome story behind it that is one of those “if you know, you know” type things in the industry. My model, the Sector Deep Pioneer, has a design, feature set, and overall quality that make it stand on its own at the price point. This is the epitome of what I think of when I look for a true overbuilt tool-watch diver.

I started working on the review process for this piece in September and, to be honest, it has been hard to get anything else into the spot on my wrist. I look forward to finishing the testing and evaluation on this watch this month so I can give everyone my full review. Even after that is done, though, this is going to be a top contender for a permanent spot in the collection.

6. A Pilot’s Chrono

Chronographs have a funny place in my watch collecting. I always appreciate them and respect the utility of the complication, but I have never been one who seeks them out hard. When I do, I tend to stay away from mechanical chronos. The extra cost of purchase and maintenance is something I decided a while ago was not where I was okay with sticking money for a complication that I could easily accomplish with a timing bezel on a diver—or just not be lazy and time things the old-fashioned way by remembering the start time and adding whatever time I needed to that number.

Recently, I’ve loved what Seiko has done with the Speedtimer line and have owned several variations from that collection, with a few notable favorites being the SSC965 and the limited-edition Edo Purple SSC955 (Thank you to Dom and the folks over at the Tic-Tok Shop of Craig Husar Fine Diamonds for working your magic to get me one of these.) I have liked the Navitimer-style models aesthetically from Citizen as well. The busier aesthetic has always screamed tool watch to me, and for some reason on a pilot’s chrono it has always just felt right.

My main issue with Citizen’s models was the size. With most of the models I was looking at coming in between 44 and 48 millimeters, they were way too damn big for my wrist. The couple of models I owned just felt like straight-up bricks on my wrist and usually lasted about a week before they were shipped off to someone who could pull them off better than I could.

In 2025, I was happy to see them add the 40mm Navihawk into the lineup, but I was rocking the Speedtimer at the time, so adding another chrono was at the bottom of the totem pole. Recently, on a mall trip, I walked by the small watch kiosk that I stop at sometimes. It offers the typical brands you would expect at a mall watch kiosk, and I saw that they had started getting in some of the Promaster series. In there they had two of the 40mm Navihawk variants: a silver dial and the champagne dial.

The woman there, whom I have built a relationship with, was surprised when I asked her to pull one out. She is used to seeing me wearing much different watches that are normally from a different tier than what they typically sell. I checked it out, threw it on my wrist, and decided to pick it up.

Forty millimeters was the right call for sizing. It is small enough to wear feasibly while still being big enough for the dial not to be too overcrowded and hard to read. This fills that chrono spot, and I finally have a true tool-looking chrono that I can feasibly wear and not feel like I am trying to compensate for something I am lacking below the belt line.

Honorable Mention

Another part of my E.D.C. that I do not focus on often is my wallet. I have been a pretty simple dude when it comes to wallets. A bifold that held cards and cash was good enough for me. I never understood the slim-wallet craze until recently, when I started trying to slim my on-body carry way down.

Again, while visiting MKE Blades, I found myself over at the section where they carry gear from Ridge and wondered if it was finally time to try a slim front-pocket wallet. A worry for me has always been the elastic bands wearing out easily on them. That concern was calmed by the guy I was working with pulling out his brick of a Ridge wallet, which he had loaded with way more than the suggested 15-card maximum, and telling me he had been carrying the same wallet for multiple years.

That convinced me to say fuck it and give it a shot. I picked up a classic-style Ridge Wallet in Alpine Navy and will be giving it a try to see if I can finally give in to the dark side when it comes to wallets—or if my bias against them was right all along.

To round things out, in my opinion, this is a good variety of gear to be testing over the next month: different styles of watches, a smaller knife that I can build a personal patina with, something I swore off in a slim wallet, and a tiny lower-powered light. It is going to be a very different month for me, to say the least, and I am all for it.

This should be a fun experiment and hopefully gets me further toward building the all-around ultimate slim, easy-to-carry, on-body E.D.C. setup that I have been wanting to build.