Weekend Edition: Let Cole Pennington Inspire Your Spirit Of Adventure

By Danny Milton

Just yesterday, we launched a brand new video series called Watches in the Wild, hosted by our very own wild man, Cole Pennington. In the first of three episodes, we find Cole in Thailand unearthing and deciphering the complex mysteries of Seiko watch-collecting as only he can.

To celebrate the launch, we are devoting our undivided attention to our scuba-diving, thrill-seeking, star-gazing man of the world. There are approximately five million reasons to put the spotlight on Mr. Pennington, and basically every story he’s written is worth sharing, but I decided to make things extra difficult on myself and pick a mere handful of his best stories to share with you.

In just the last year alone, Cole’s unearthed and reported on a watch that was snuck into outer space, took his personal Seiko diver to the depths of the ocean, and flew tiny airplanes with an IWC pilot’s watch on his wrist.

Lest we forget his definitive breakdown on the difference between the Omega Speedmaster in Hesalite and sapphire configurations, his deep dive with the Ploprof, or his killer Talking Watches with a real-life astronaut that features both familiar space-worthy timepieces, and some unexpected ones.

Cole has a well-known penchant for delivering deeply reported stories on military history and adventure, famously taking a Marathon watch on a cross-country road trip (complete with campfire cooking), and writing about the whole experience. He single-handedly made the phrase “Always read the caseback’‘ famous.

The five pieces we’ve chosen for this weekend represent the broad range of storytelling Cole has delivered over the years and offer a little bit of everything from video to technical writing to magazine features. But we couldn’t choose them all, unfortunately. Some truly fantastic pieces missed the cut this weekend – like his HODINKEE Magazine cover story, “The Watch That Came In From The Cold.” If you have some extra time, you can hear Cole perform a live reading of that piece, here.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy …read more