Understanding Your GMT, the Traveler’s Best Friend
Time seems to move at a different pace when you’re on the road. Stimulated by novelty and challenge, the hours expand with new experiences — a day of travel often occupies the same amount of space in your mind as a week of ‘normal’ home life. As a traveler, you feel the difference, but the watch on your wrist is immune to these distortions.
With two separate hour hands moving in lock-step but at different speeds, GMT watches allow you to take in two time zones at a glance — the hour at home, and the hour abroad. Since they took to the skies at the dawn of the commercial aviation era some seventy years ago, GMT movements have been the sought-after companion of pilots, adventurers, business travelers, and wanderers.
The Venturer GMT is our contribution to the genre. The style of GMT we use is what is known as a ‘traveler’s’ GMT, sometimes (controversially) referred to as a ‘true’ GMT. This style of GMT complication differs from ‘caller’ or ‘office’ GMT movements as it features an independently adjustable hour hand that makes it easy to set your watch to a new time zone without stopping the seconds hand or disrupting the second time zone tracked by the triangular GMT hand.
SO, HOW DO YOU USE YOUR GMT WATCH?
Let’s assume a few things for the sake of ease. You live on the East Coast of the United States and want to keep track of the time in London, which just so happens to be in the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) time zone.
We’re also going to assume that the current time on the East Coast is 10:09 AM, meaning the time in London is 3:09 PM. Once set, the time on your watch should look like this.
SETTING THE TIME ABROAD
First things first, we’re going to forget all about the time and date on the East Coast. We’ll be setting the watch to GMT time to kick things off.
- Make sure the internal bezel of your watch is displaying the 24 marker up top above the 12-hour position.
- Unscrew the crown until it “pops” out. This is what we’ll call Position 1, the winding position. While we’re here, give the crown a few good winds to stack up some extra power reserve.
- Then, pull the crown out all the way to the furthest position (Position 3). Remember, we’re only focused on the time in London right now, which is 15:09. Rotate the crown until the GMT hand is pointing just past the 15 mark (the line between the 14 and 16 numerals) and the minute hand is at the 9 mark. GMT time sorted!
SETTING THE DATE
A little foible of traveler’s GMT movements is that they do not feature a mechanism for quickly changing the date. No biggie, however. To set the date, push the crown in back by one position to Position 2. This is the position that controls the independently adjustable hour hand. To set the date, simply rotate the hour hand around the dial continuously—forwards or backwards, whatever makes you get to your desired date the fastest—until you’ve reached the correct date. Don’t forget to account for whether it’s morning or afternoon in your timezone, or you might find the dat leaping ahead as you head out for your lunch break!
LOCAL TIME
Now that you’ve set the date, we can finally move on to setting the local time (10:09 Eastern in this case). To do this, we’ll stay in the same crown position used to set the date (Position 2) and simply adjust the hour hand to 10 o’clock.
Since we’re already in Position 2, only the hour hand should be moving when doing this. The seconds hand should keep running, and the minute and GMT hands should stay put while you’re making this adjustment.
ALTERNATING BETWEEN DIFFERENT TIME ZONES (WITH EASE!)
Your watch is now set up to show you the time at home on the East Coast and across the pond in London. But what if London is no longer the second most important time zone for you? It’s time to put that rotating bezel to work!
Imagine today is your favorite cousin’s birthday. She lives in Los Angeles. The timezone in Los Angeles is 3 hours behind yours on the East Coast and 8 hours behind your buddy’s timezone in London. You want to call your cousin today when she gets home from work a little after 5 PM. To remind yourself of this, you want to change your second time zone from London to L.A. Here’s what you do.
- Unscrew the 10 o’clock crown and rotate it through 8 hours to account for the new time zone you’re looking to track.
- The 24 on the internal bezel was at the dial’s 12-hour position; now it’s just above the dial’s 4 o’clock marker, while the 16 on the internal bezel is above the double baton markers at 12.
If you look at the time now, it’s still 10:09 locally, but your GMT hand is pointing just past the line between the 6 and 8-hour markers on the bezel, showing the time in the second zone you’re tracking is 7:09 AM.
Want to change back to London time? Just unscrew the 10H crown and rotate clockwise until the 24 is back up top where it was before, and voila! You’re back right where you wanted to be.
WHAT ABOUT RUMORS OF READING A THIRD TIME ZONE?
It’s true, there are those out there who use the internal rotating to display three times at once. We think this is a bit excessive and overly complicated. But, theoretically, it can be done. Here’s how:
Let’s say you want to keep track of your cousin’s time zone in L.A. and your buddy in London’s timezone at the same time. Well, your watch is up to the challenge… if you’re willing to do a little arithmetic.
If your watch is set up just link in the image above (the one of the Steel Blue Venturer GMT) you’re actually already referencing all 3 of these time zones.
“But how? The time is 10:09 AM at home and 7:09 AM in L.A.? What do you mean it’s showing another timezone?!” You might ask.
Well… as we said, there’s some math involved. To decipher what GMT time is, we’ll disregard the numerals and markings on the bezel entirely. You just look where the GMT hand is pointing in relation to the dial’s hour markers and double that. In our example, the GMT hand is pointing between the 7 and 8-hour indices. So, 7.5 X 2 = 15. Meaning the time in London, GMT time (or UTC time), is 15:09.
It’s that simple. (We don’t actually think it’s that simple…)
WHERE TO NEXT?
This may seem complicated now, but play around with your watch for a few days, and it will all become second nature. Soon, it will become part of your travel ritual, like counting the stamps in your passport or lining up those podcasts for the long ride in the sky.