Watch collectors who have been in the hobby for awhile know there?s a certain pleasure in looking in the watch box, or across the flat surfaces in your home where watches are scattered, whatever, and seeing a group of watches that make sense. If you believe a collection is a reflection of your personality and taste, it follows that the watches in the collection will be thematically linked in some way, and just kind of work together. Instead of a watch box that has exactly one watch from each key genre, you see a box of watches that defy easy categorization, but somehow are obviously the product of a core collecting philosophy. I don?t know if I?m quite there yet, but I?m getting closer. But there?s still one watch in my collection that?s a clear outlier, one that will never quite fit. It?s the runt of the litter, the redheaded step-child, and ugly duckling, all wrapped into one. My Seiko SRPG17 ?Land Tortoise? just doesn?t belong. 
The Land Tortoise, so named because it shares a case shape with the much-loved ?Seiko Turtle? divers but is equipped with a compass bezel rather than a typical dive timer, is an outlier even among Seiko sports watches. When we think sporty Seikos, proper dive watches are the ones that inevitably come to mind for most of us, but this is a dive watch in a costume. From the outset, it?s resisting its own nature, rejecting its heritage. It refuses to wear the uniform.
I like dive watches and own a few, but they don?t operate as centerpieces in t...