Hunting, fishing and survival watches for a whole season on one charge

What to buy first

A hunting watch has three jobs: tell you legal shooting light without a phone, get you back to the truck in the dark, and survive a season of gloves, rain and treestand steel without a charger in your pack. The hunting watch rankings put the Garmin Instinct 3 Solar first for that combination. If you want a track of where you walked and maps of public land boundaries, the GPS hunting watch rankings lead with the fenix 8 Solar. If you never want to think about a battery, the deer season picks are G-Shocks with sunrise and sunset built in.

GPS or ABC: the only decision that matters

Every hunting watch is one of two things, and our GPS vs ABC watch for hunting comparison is the page to read first.

• GPS watches (Garmin Instinct, fenix, Enduro; COROS Nomad and VERTIX 2S) record a track, mark waypoints, show sunrise, sunset and moon on the watch, and on the fenix and COROS models show a map. Their battery is measured in days of GPS; a solar Instinct or fenix stretches that to a whole season of short sessions.
• ABC watches (G-Shock Rangeman, Mudman, Mudmaster; Suunto Core Alpha; Pro Trek) give you bearing, altitude, pressure trend and, on the Casios, sunrise and sunset. No track, no map, no charger, and a battery Casio measures in months from a full solar charge. They are the buy-it-for-life answer if you hunt the same ground every year.

What decides the price

Maps first: a mapping Garmin costs roughly twice a non-mapping one. Then solar, then sapphire. For most whitetail hunters in a stand, a map is a phone job and the watch's job is the sunrise table and the walk out, which is why our picks are cheaper than the ones on gear-magazine lists. Backcountry elk and public-land hunters are the exception, and the GPS rankings say so.

The mistake buyers make

Buying a bright AMOLED watch for a treestand. A screen you can read at noon on a trail is a beacon at 5:40 a.m. in November, and AMOLED watches lose most of their battery keeping that screen alive. A memory-in-pixel Garmin or a G-Shock digital is readable with a backlight tap and dark the rest of the time. The second mistake is forgetting gloves: touchscreens and small buttons are for other seasons. Every pick here has real buttons.

Sunrise, sunset and moon on the watch

Legal light is a sunrise-table question and it varies by state and by day. A watch that shows sunrise and sunset for your position, without a phone, is the single most useful hunting feature a watch has, and our sunrise, sunset and moon phase watches guide lists which models do it and how each one calculates it.

Survival watches

A survival watch is a hunting watch that has to work after the phone dies: compass, barometer for weather, a battery that does not care about the cold, and a case that shrugs off a fall. The survival watch rankings weigh those against each other, and the answer is usually a solar ABC watch or a solar Garmin in max-battery mode.

By brand

The Garmin side of this question lives in best Garmin watch for hunting; the Casio side in best G-Shock for hunting. The ABC watch rankings cover Suunto and Pro Trek alongside the G-Shocks.