Chronometers and chronographs are often confused and are names sometimes used interchangeably.  They are in fact two completely different devices.  A chronograph is basically a stopwatch or any instrument that is designed for measuring elapsed time.  Chronometers on the other hand are highly accurate watches and are not meant for measuring the duration of a specific event.

The first chronometers appeared in the middle of the 18th Century, invented by an English carpenter named John Harrison.  What set them apart from ordinary clocks of the time was that they did not rely on a pendulum, but rather worked based on the oscillations of weighted beams connected by springs that were impervious to motion.  This meant that unlike a pendulum clock, Harrison’s chronometer could tell time accurately on a boat at sea, even under storm conditions.

The ability to tell time accurately while at sea may not sound like a big deal, but it was a major breakthrough for ocean navigation, allowing for a high standard of accuracy for maps and greatly reducing the risks of getting lost at sea or running into dangerous waters.  Prior to Harrison’s invention, navigation at sea was based on ‘dead reckoning’, which allowed a sailor to determine a vague latitudinal position based on the position of the stars, but gave no insight to his longitudinal position whatsoever.  By using a sextant to gauge the position of the sun or stars, you can determine what time it is where you are locally.  Then, if you have an accurate time keeping mechanism based on the time in some other location, you can determine your distance from that location.

So the first chronometers did just that, they kept an accurate measurement of the time in a designated location, which was always Greenwich, England as a standard.  Then as sailors traveled they could measure the longitudinal distance they had gone by comparing local time to time in England.  Harrison’s first inventions were very large and suffered from slight inaccuracies that became apparent on longer voyages.  Eventually he produced a small and highly accurate model called the ‘H4′, which was the worlds first pocket watch, an invention that eventually led to today’s wristwatches.

Mechanical chronometers advanced over the years, but used the same basic weighted beam idea Harrison invented until the 20th century, when the discovery of the microchip and quartz time keeping movements rendered his ideas basically obsolete.  Today, chronometers actually used in navigation are electronic, and function with GPS satellite support.

Now the word chronometer doesn’t mean what it used to.  Any time keeping mechanism that meets the standards of the Swiss Official Chronometer Testing Institute, designated COSC based on the organizations French name, is a chronometer.  What that basically means is any watch that meets a high standard of accuracy under an array of conditions, including different pressures, temperatures and even under water, is officially labeled as a ‘chronometer’.

There are lots and lots of people who will not eat factory farmed meat, but I am one of the only people I know who will not eat farmed fish. It all goes back to one time when I was a kid. We went to one of those fish farms meant for private fishers. Basically, there are two kinds of fish farming out there. There is the fish farm industry which produces most of the processed seafood that you eat in your daily life. Fish sticks, fish and chips, and even the baked salmon you order at your local seafood chain probably come from fish farms. These places are supposed to be pretty sterile, but in reality they are massively crowded. The fish are stuffed into small pond of water, crawling around on top of each other amidst heavy pollution. How do I know? Because I visited the second kind of fish farm as a kid.

Your typical aquaculture farm isn’t accessible to the community, but many of these fish farms supply salmon, catfish, trout and other freshwater creatures to farm fishing lakes. Basically, these are places where dads who don’t know how to fish can take their kids to catch their own fish. At this kind of fish farm, the lakes are literally jumping with them. The one we went to had hundreds upon hundreds of catfish, all bounding for the bait in a feeding frenzy. There is no challenge to catching something at a fish farm. There’s no sport to it at all. You drop a worm in the water and three fish bite for it. They are probably just committing suicide to get away from the crowded conditions.

The water was murky, the fish was disgusting and the whole experience at that fish farm was so unpleasant that I never wanted to eat fish again. A few years later I would eat ocean fish, but it was years before I would touched a freshwater fish. To this very day, I won’t eat anything from the sea unless I know that it really is from the sea. Farm raised fish is right out, no matter how clean and sanitary the conditions are supposed to be. I figured that if fish farms are that disgusting when they invite visitors in, the ones that you don’t get to see are probably that much worse. The idea makes me feel queasy and sick to my stomach.

When I was a kid, I was absolutely fascinated by my dad fishing tackle box. It seemed to me that he had the most magnificent and varied fishing supplies imaginable. With his fishing tackle, he could trick any fish there was, or so I thought. He had many different flies and lures, most of them hand tied and custom made by him. Except for the basics like fishing line, no one bought their own fishing supply equipment in those days. If you were a good fisherman, you made your own. It wasn’t just a matter of quality, but of pride.

It seems like, with the rapid advance of fishing supplies, a lot of the sport has been taken out of it these days. I went on a fishing trip with a good friend of mine, a fairly wealthy individual who owns his own motor yacht. He actually has a GPS fishfinder, weather radar gear and many other different kind of sophisticated equipment to find the schools of fish. Finding fish with him isn’t an art anymore. It is not a matter of instincts, of sport or luck. It is simply a matter of cold hard science, following the manual and letting the technology do that work. To me, this takes all the fun out of it.

I talked to him about this and he said it was just a matter of him owning more sophisticated fishing supplies than my father had. He claimed that, had they sold GPS fishfinders in fly fishing stores in my father’s day, everyone would have bought them. They wouldn’t have wasted time with hand tying their own fishing lures if they could instantly know where to get the fish. I see things differently, however.

In my mind, what my father loved so much about fishing, and what my friend and people like him miss, is the opportunity to commune with nature. Yes he was out there to catch fish, but in the process he had to know everything about a stretch of river. He had to know every ripple and what is signified, what time of day the fish came out, how precisely to land the line, and which fishing supplies to use in which season. It was a meditative activity that involved his whole being. In order for him to succeed at it, everything had to be done perfectly. It wasn’t simply a matter of looking at the radar and dropping a line.

Sports and all the equipment that goes with it is big business in our country. All kinds of sports are highly valued. Our professional sports teams are multi-million dollar businesses. Professional athletes get paid multiple million dollar contracts for their skills on a playing field. Many people wish they could join this elite group of individuals. There are also individuals that make a great deal of money for other popular pass times, such as the professional fishermen. They are less well known because fishing does not appeal to as large of an audience, however big money can be accumulated for doing what many people enjoy as a weekend sport.

A friend of ours is trying to break into the ranks of professional fishing. You do this by fishing in tournaments. You need to pay your entry fees and then gather points which are based on how many fish you catch and if you place in the tournament. To place you need to catch the greatest weight of fish during the course of the tournament. Some tournaments are one day others are up to three days. There are different professional tournament circuits that a person can join. Each tournament you enter in the circuit keeps a running total of your points. As you fish more and hopefully win tournaments your name becomes recognized. Once this happens you can get sponsorships to help defray the cost of the entry fees, tackle, gas and travel.

Our friend has won enough tournaments that he has added mercury outboard engines to his group of sponsors. This is a great benefit to him because he gets the mercury outboard engines at a lower cost. In return he displays the mercury outboard engines decals on his boat and trailer. He also wears the logo on his clothing. He also has smaller sponsors such as tackle and fishing line companies. They give him a break on his tackle in exchange for his display of the logos. This is free advertising for the companies and also increases their sales when other fishermen buy their products because they see the professionals using them.  The larger the company you are able to get as a sponsor the more seriously you are taken as a professional fishermen. This can lead to getting your own line of tackle as well as a fishing show on sports television.

Being a professional fisherman takes a great deal of time away from your family. It also places pressure on the person to catch fish. The pressure to catch fish to earn money may take some of the fun out of having a day on the lake. Trying to sell yourself to get sponsors also becomes time consuming. The big companies, like Mercury outboard engines are going to expect some results from the people they sponsor, or they will find another person to back that is performing. It gets to be quite a competitive venture.