Luminox is honoring its partnership with Force Blue by releasing a new Pacific Diver reference designed around the pair’s shared mission to protect and rehabilitate the world’s oceans. Luminox has a long history of working with branches of the US Military since their founding in 1989, but their relationship with Force Blue is a bit different. To better understand their mission and get a first look at a new watch built around the partnership, I hopped on a plane down to Miami with fins and mask in hand, ready to dive with the team.
Many brands claim working relationships with military outfits, each with varying degrees of formality. Whether it’s a licensed relationship to use military trademarks, or even individual service members using their personal watches, the link between a brand and the act of service can be difficult to judge at a glance. For Luminox, that connection was baked in from the get-go. In 1992, founder Barry Cohen worked with Assistant Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) Officer Nick North to develop a watch specifically for the Navy SEALs using their tritium tube-based Luminox Light Technology (LLT).
The Navy SEAL watch was the first stone in what would become a broad foundation of work with special forces and law enforcement groups worldwide. It’s a foundation that Mondain would continue to lean on after acquiring a stake in the brand in 2006 and full ownership in 2016. Today, Luminox maintains a licensing relationship with the US Navy SEALs and Lockheed Martin; however, the more interesting and arguably more meaningful partners are the likes of the Navy SEAL Foundation, the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue (ICE-SAR), Folds of Honor, and Force Blue.
Force Blue & The Mission
Force Blue is a non-profit organization built with the express purpose of wielding the skills of special operations and combat veterans toward ocean protection and preservation projects. The project has the dual benefit of providing purpose and care to veterans who need it, as well as providing a tangible benefit to scientific teams working to protect and restore the most vulnerable parts of the oceans. The veterans I spoke to on location expressed a strong connection to ocean environments and viewed it as their responsibility to help preserve and protect them because they had the ability to do so. This is their mission.
That word, mission, was thrown around a lot on this trip, as was the concept of ‘every second counts’ to underscore the urgency of that mission. This mission began in 2019 (with Luminox joining as an official partner in 2022) with the University of Miami and is focused on re-establishing the coral reef system in Key Biscayne. This is a reef system that has been heavily deteriorated by the effects of climate change, as well as population factors in the surrounding areas.
The efforts are centered around a 100-yard patch dubbed ‘100 yards of hope’ – the theme was launched around the Super Bowl, which was held in Miami in 2020, for maximum exposure; hence the 100-yard selection. Force Blue veteran divers worked alongside scientists from the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science to ‘plant’ harvested nursery-grown deer antler corals along the stretch. This involved divers harvesting healthy corals thriving in warmer water and using their ‘seeds’ to reproduce new corals that could then be planted in the selected 100-yard region. The process is called coral gardening.
The planting efforts were completed in 2022, and now, four years later, the team is returning with scientists from the University of Miami to assess growth at three locations along the stretch. These are the dives I would join, allowing me to observe the divers’ efforts alongside two Luminox team members. Prior to the dive, we received samples of the new Pacific Diver Force Blue edition wear during the dive.
The Dive
The author, Blake Buettner, contributor at Hodinkee.
The three dives were done in the nearly 87-degree waters of Key Biscayne, allowing for a simple rash guard and shorts setup. I dove alongside newly minted diver (and fellow writer, photographer) Ed Rhee and 27-year US Marine Corps veteran, Jeremy Gabrielson, who would give us a tour of the sites as well as some exploration of the surrounding areas. My maximum recorded depth was about 33 ft, or 10 meters, which, along with the warm water and clear visibility, made the dives a relatively relaxing experience.
To be clear, I am not a marine biologist (and unlike Art Vandelay, I don’t even pretend to be one), so take my observations of the coral growth with that knowledge in mind. The key indicator that I was hoping to observe was the presence of marine wildlife, and in that regard, the work done four years ago seemed to be having a positive impact on the local environment. A cadre of different species lay underneath my every move, from the very colorful to the very invasive (lionfish), making the new reef growths a seemingly comfortable place for life to thrive.
The team conducted dives at three locations along the reef, with the final location yielding the most promising results. Given the nature of coral gardening, there is a level of attrition that comes with the territory, but a healthy percentage of the bases put in place four years prior seem to have taken root. There was a noticeable presence of coral stalks across a vibrant landscape of structures, signifying an effective planting session.
The idea here is to create a working template that can be scaled, and while not every locale in need will have resources from the likes of Force Blue to aid in the rather arduous underwater processes, the work done in Florida shows that it can be done. Providing an outlet for highly skilled special operations veterans feels like a natural solution to help with such a pressing problem, and Force Blue feels exactly the same way.
“If you have the ability, you have the responsibility” is a line I heard repeated often amongst the Force Blue team, and as such, they took that responsibility seriously. It was enough to reflect on my abilities and ponder whether or not I was putting them to use in a socially responsible manner. Such is the commitment to duty of these individuals, and it was infectious. There was an unspoken recognition that a message of conservation and environmental responsibility from this lot strikes a very different tone than coming from a more stereotypical source.
The Watch
Accompanying us on the dive was, of course, the new Pacific Diver Force Blue edition from Luminox, done in blue, yellow, and black, and while it wasn’t perfect underwater, it did convey the Force Blue brand and message effectively. The watch itself is built on the existing Luminox Pacific Diver, boasting a steel case measuring a healthy 44mm in diameter with a 200-meter depth rating. It houses a Rhonda 515 quartz movement and measures 12mm in thickness, with a total length of 51mm.
The watch uses a unique Carbonox carbon bezel that is lightweight and uniform in appearance, with etched numerals marking each five-minute interval with a yellow infill. This pairs with a blue dial and yellow hour markers, with a yellow rope motif (which is lumed) separating the chapter ring from the dial itself. Tritium tubes are set perpendicular to the hour markers, as well as within each of the hands.
It’s a handsome, if inoffensive, design that picks up on Luminox’s design language seen since the original SEALs watch. The tritium tubes are a clear differentiator, though I have a hard time picking them out at a distance, making legibility somewhat challenging in low-light situations. The tubes themselves are a bit too thin, and my 43-year-old eyes had a hard time locking onto a specific tube.
My biggest gripe with the watch was the bezel, which I found particularly challenging to use in the water. Okay, so the watch isn’t a vital tool for diving these days, but I am still in the habit of using the bezel to track bottom time to engage with the watch while at depth. The issue with the bezel of the Pacific Diver is the pip at 12, which is represented by a single vertical tube, the very same shape that separates each of the minute markings, meaning it very easily blends in with the 12 other vertical lines present on the bezel. As a result, I rotated past the mark multiple times before spotting it to set it to the minute hand.
As a non-vital bit of kit underwater, details like this are easy to brush aside as ‘no big deal’, but at the same time, it is exactly details like this that elevate the great examples in an abundant landscape of attractive divers out there at the moment. The existing Pacific Diver with a white dial and black indices would serve as a far more practical underwater companion (and at 39mm, a daily companion at that), but the tradeoff for a thematically on-point example done for Force Blue feels, ultimately, worthwhile here.
Final Thoughts
Force Blue deserves a huge amount of credit for taking the initiative not only to step up and put their skills to use for the benefit of the planet’s oceans, but also to provide a space for combat veterans to work together in a healthy and productive manner. Their missions often serve as a way to work through PTS in a low-stress environment with the support of others who have a shared experience. The work provides a sense of extended purpose to the years of training and experience accrued over tours of duty in service to our country. For their part, Luminox has fully bought into the program, and the fact that multiple members of their team joined us on the dive serves as a testament to that.
Under a microscope, the watch itself leaves plenty to be desired, and at $875, there is no shortage of compelling competition. That said, I still find myself drawn to the OG Luminox design language, and I wish more of it were present here. The Pacific Diver collection taps into a meaningful connection with special forces operations around the world, and the connection to Force Blue pushes this particular example further into that territory. Those connections are the real draw with this watch, and viewing it through any other lens may leave you wanting.
Force Blue co-founder Jim Ritterhoff put it best when he said, “performance doesn’t mean anything unless you perform,” meaning all the capabilities in the world are for naught unless put to good use. With that in mind, many of the dive watch stats we often get bogged down with feel strangely vacant. Using them in a meaningful context is what matters, and that’s exactly what Force Blue and Luminox have done with this collaboration.
