What makes dive watches such a hit with watch fans?

Watches are just not meant to be worn into the sea. This is a truism that I had internalized ever since I started wearing a watch, as a teenager in the 1990s. The Timex Indiglo with a rotating timing bezel I had back then was good to withstand the occasional rain, but anything more would be putting it in jeopardy.

This fear of exposing my watch to the open ocean was playing on me, a couple of months ago, as I stepped into the Andaman Sea in Thailand. The surf was gentle on the island of Phi Phi Don, and quite rough off the coast of Phuket, but in either case, I needn’t have worried with my Seiko dive watch, the ref. SPB317, rated to a full 200m of water resistance.

Now, a watch that can withstand 200m of water pressure is no joke. After all, a free diver, i.e. someone diving without scuba gear, usually descends to an average of not more than 6m (a little over 19 feet), and even advanced divers would only go to about double that depth (the outer limit of such dives being 60ft). In fact, even recreational scuba divers only descend to about 40m (about 130ft)—any deeper than that and it’s a technical dive.

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As I splashed about in the surf and went snorkelling in Thailand, the Seiko held firm and true, while I timed my watery sojourns by turning the unidirectional timing bezel on the watch. The black dial was perfectly legible under water, due to it’s generously luminescent paint-filled (lumed) hands and indices. The main thing that impressed me is just how ridiculously over-engineered modern watches are.

Of course, for a ‘tool watch’ like the SPB317—a timepiece that is to be treated like a professional tool, instead of aesthetic wrist-wear—this isn’t surprising. After all, ever since the first dive watches came into existence in the 1950s—the original four trendsetters were Blancpain Fifty Fathoms, the Zodiac Sea Wolf, the Rolex Submariner and the Omega Seamaster—their evolution have been driven by the needs of military divers, ocean scientists and recreational divers. Right till the ubiquity of dive computers from the 1990s onwards, a dive watch was as vital a tool for a diver as her fins or scuba gear.

Even now, many divers still wear a dive watch, in addition to dive computers, as a get-out-of-jail-free card in case of digital failure. And while the best of modern smartwatches also boast of serious diving capabilities, none have been tested to the extent that mechanical dive watches have been. In fact, my increasing fascination with divers has lead me to seek out literature on the use of such watches by scientists and soldiers in the past 70 years, and the evidence bears out just how badass these tools are.

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When dive watches are marketed as lifestyle products, the literature focuses on the likes of Sean Connery’s James Bond wearing an early Rolex Submariner ref. 6538 in Dr. No, or Charlie Sheen’s character, Captain Willard, wearing a Seiko ref. 6105-8110 in Apocalypse Now. But the real-world examples of professionals wearing dive watches as no-nonsense tools in daunting environments is far more interesting.

For example, the legendary French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau’s choice of watch while diving in the late 1960s was the Doxa Sub 300. Rolex’s sister brand Tudor made special dive watches for the French Marine Nationale, while Rolex made ‘mil-spec’ (military specification) Submariners for the British Royal Navy up till the early 1980s.

The Seiko 6105 series of divers have graced the wrists of an entire generation of field scientists at organizations like the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). Famed Japanese explorer Naomi Uemura drove a dog sled from Greenland to Alaska in 1976 wearing a ref. 6105-8110. The fact that my SPB317 is a modern recreation of the ref. 6105-8000 from 1968 gives me great joy.

In fact, I got a sense of just how popular dive watches are with scuba divers in Australia last year, while on a snorkeling trip to the Great Barrier Reef. Every second dive instructor was sporting beat up Seiko automatic or Citizen solar quartz divers, while others were wearing Casio G-Shocks. I even spotted some rare Vostok Amphibias, a cheap-but-rugged Russian line of divers that began production in 1960s U.S.S.R for the Soviet Navy.

For a while now, among watch collectors, the dive watch has been the quintessential everyday watch. And most such people, me included, don’t really go diving. So, what accounts for their desirability? For starters, the looks. Given the mid-20th century genesis of the dive watch, these have always been exceptionally designed watches, with every brand adding a distinctively individual design twist to the standard look and feel.

A dive watch’s rotating elapsed time bezel is marked with gradations counting up from 0-60 minutes, with a lumed pip on the bezel above the 12’0’clock marker acting as the point of reference. So, whether you want to time your dive or your espresso brew, simply rotate the bezel so the pip is in line with the minute hand. This way, you can tell the elapsed time in minutes by the gradations on the bezel.

Since this feature can be a matter of life or death for a diver, the bezel is always unidirectional, and it’s ratcheted 120-click action ensures that it can’t be accidentally reset. The fact that dive watches come with a depth rating of at least 200m—thanks to the screwed down crown and the screwed-in case back—ensure that these watches both look great and are worry-free, two attributes that stood me in good stead in the Andaman Sea.

Handwound is a monthly column on watches and watchmaking.

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