Steaks on the BBQ, your child’s time-out, that chat with a work colleague that always feels like it goes on forever (“oh, sorry Susan, I’ve really gotta run”), short intervals of billable time in the office, time remaining in a presentation if you think about it long enough, you’ll certainly come up with a few more too. Just think for a second about all of the little tasks in your daily lives that could benefit from a short-run countdown timer. The thing is, you really don’t need to be out on the water to make use of a yachting timer. Of that contingent, a few might actually even compete here and there. Sure, a small percentage of us might get out on a sailboat from time to time. If you want to dig deeper into that, Cruising World has a great “Racing 101” feature, but you probably get the fundamentals by now at the very least. A sound is typically triggered to announce the starting of this countdown, giving competitors warning to start their timers and prepare to launch out of the starting gates. Typically a 5-minute interval (with some variance), the yachting timer complication – also called a regatta timer – was created specifically for timing these countdowns. Thus, a running start of sorts needs to be undertaken, which means a countdown takes place as boats jockey for position in relation to the starting line. Powered by wind, there is no “mashing the throttle” from a standstill to get things moving. When competing in a regatta, getting off of the starting line is a bit of a convoluted process. You don’t spend your weekends competing in regattas? That’s ok though, as its function also has other applications in the real world (but more on that later). A yachting timer (like the Rolex Yacht-Master II) for example, is designed to aid in the countdown to the start of a regatta (a yacht or boat race). There are a lot of watchmaking complications out there that aren’t particularly useful for the “mass market” – moonphase complications in particular, but also others.
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