The Dive Watch Game

Because it's hot outside

It’s high summer. It’s hot, it’s bright, it’s a work day, and the most you are looking forward to is snatching 90 minutes at the community pool this evening and sucking down a lukewarm beer and a Marlboro behind a rhododendron before the 10th grader on duty catches you. 

You need some escapism. Right? I do.

Let’s pretend you can afford to spend a little money—not stupid money, but not nothing—on a summer escape watch. 

Something fun, something bright and colorful, a Hawaiian shirt of a watch. Not a pretend-serious desk diver MilSub that pairs well with a dinner jacket. 

Something that sits on your wrist and makes you smile at a red light while you daydream of that beachside tiki bar you swore blind in high school you’d own by now. 

You know what I mean.

Because here’s the thing about dive watches: they’re a game, really. Nobody needs a diver. 

What makes a diver a diver is bright, high contrast visibility at depth, decent waterproofing—200m is the industry standard—and a timing bezel to let you know how long you’ve got before you need to come back up, with or without stopping to decompress along the way. 

Diving first became a civilian pursuit in the ‘50s and became a recreational hobby in the 1960s-’70s. Which is when these tool watches were first widely used. But today, if you’re halfway serious about scuba diving (I am not) you’re going down into the deep with a computer strapped to your wrist and you have your dive plan plotted out to the minute long before you go over the side of the boat.

So dive watches are an anachronism. They’re for the idea of diving much more than for the thing itself.

They aren’t costume jewelry, exactly, because they’re real enough pieces of kit and can do the thing they are supposed to do. But they are more about ocean LARPing than actual, deep-sea action.

But that’s the joy of them, really. You don’t have to be a serious diver to want or enjoy one. In fact, if you take any of this seriously, you weren’t listening.

So, play our little game and just enjoy it.

Let’s pretend you want a summer dive watch, not because you’re on a boat—but because you aren’t and you want something that gives you the whiff of salt water and sunscreen anyway.

Here’s my top four:

Doxa Sub300t

This is the watch I have. And I have it for all the reasons I mention above. The original Sub300 was the standard issue for Jacques Cousteau and the crew of Calypso, and if you want something that makes your shitty KIA Sorento feel just a little bit like a rigid-inflatable launch skipping over a reef as you head to the grocery store, this does the job for me every time.

It has Doxa’s hallmark dive time bezel: the outer ring shows depth in feet fixed alongside the maximum time at that depth you can stay down without needing to pause to decompress on the way up.

The lume on this thing is… well it’s bright. It’s very bright. And the oversized orange minute hand offers maximum contrast and visibility at depth because, apparently, orange is the last color you lose as the water washes everything to shades of blue as you dive. The hour hand is minimized because for dive timing you’re not counting in hours.

The lozenge shaped case (tonneau, if you want to be that way about it) is pure ‘70s design—it’s the watch world equivalent of bell bottoms and a horseshoe mustache—but again, that’s the fun of this thing.

The rad-trad Doxas actually have an orange dial face with black hands, and they make them in a something-for-everyone series of color options. They’re just fun.

And they are ludicrously over-specced. 

I mentioned that 200m water resistance is pretty much industry standard, and let’s be clear, if you’re a recreational diver then the most you’ll ever need is about half that.

Well, this watch goes to 12. 

Twelve. Hundred. Meters. That’s three Sears Towers end on end on end. Why bother, you ask? 

Like I said, the thing about dive watches is mostly because you can, not because you need it for anything. You’re buying this thing because it looks cool, it makes you feel cool, and the fact that it goes to 12 only makes it cooler. 

Regardless of whether you need it or not, regardless of there being any situation, ever, where you are three-quarters of a mile under water and actually have your watch be a concern, the point is it works down there anyway—under the pressure of 120 atmospheres. As a piece of human engineering, a metal box of gears and springs, that’s just awesome.

And since I am far more likely to wear this thing above the water than under it, let me just note that the Doxa beads of rice bracelet is the most comfortable watch strap ever. I mean that.

Anyway, the Sub300t will run you less than $1,900 new, on either the bracelet or a rubber strap. 

Squale 1521

The kind of people who hang out on watch forums would be pissed at me for this pick. But then, I hang out on watch forums to say things like this to piss those kind of people off. So there we are.

Squale were started in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, by Charles Von Buren in the late ‘40s but they came into their own in the following decade. Von Buren was something of an enthusiast for free diving (no tanks, you just hold your breath), which he was wont to do in the Med, but also in Lake Neuchâtel (which looks cold as hell to me).

Would you buy I want from this guy? Hell yes you would.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, Squales were considered the watch for free divers and were often given as prizes in international competitions. They also pioneered design elements we now take for granted. Crown at 4 o’clock? Yeah. Bi-colored timing bezel? Yep, that too. 

They never were a fully integrated shop—they would buy their movements from other manufacturers, and this was totally normal for most of the twentieth century and still is for some places. Watch manufacturers tended to have specialties. Squale made cases. Cases so good that companies like Doxa and Blancpain (whose Fifty Fathoms divers tend to get more watch-snob street cred than Omega) outsourced to them for their higher spec models.

Their 1521 model is a design classic. And at less than $1,000 it is very affordable, too.

Like a lot Swiss makers, in the post quartz era they struggled to keep going. Squale passed from the Von Buren family through a couple of different owners’ hands, none of whom could make much of it until throwback dive watches became cool and they started making something of a comeback a few years ago. They are now owned by the Italian family (still made in Switzerland) who did the marketing for the Von Burens back in the day.

But why, you ask, would forum dwellers get pissed about this? Well, when they were trying to keep things going, Squale started turning out a lot—a lot—of homage divers. “Homage” is watch industry code for “cheap design rip off,” usually directed at the most recognizable Rolex models, such as the Submariner.

It’s the unforgivable sin. The absolute lowest rung on the ladder of Swiss watchmaking. And yeah, Squale kinda did this, for years. But you know what? Times were tough and you do what you gotta do.  

And how embarrassed do they really need to be when the company started off making them for Blancpain’s 1968 Fifty Fathoms special issue for the German military?

Find me a watch guy who’ll call the Fifty Fathoms an homage watch. Because I’ll fight them.

While the Squale MilSubs are still available on a couple of sites, they are not on the company webpage, and I get the impression they stopped making them and people are just getting rid of the old stock.

Anyway, the 1521 is priced to move, and anyone who actually knows a damn thing about dive watch history respects it.

They also make some frankly just shiny, fun stuff. And their enameled bezels are nuts.

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Seiko Kira Zuri Baby Tuna

Look, this one sells itself. I’m not going to bore you by banging on about what everyone knows. Seiko makes good watches. As far as straightforward, consistent, quality for decent money goes, I can’t think of anyone who does it better. 

If you want a very serviceable, perfectly robust diver that delivers across all the quadrants, there’s every argument for saying you should just get yourself a turtle—they make them in every color and finish you could want, and the Save the Ocean series has something new almost every year. 

But let’s talk about something a little bit extra.

It’s called a baby tuna because it’s a scaled down version (in size and specs) of Seiko’s most serious Marine Master deep diver, nicknamed the tuna because it looks something like a tuna can. In reality, it’s like wearing a hockey puck on your wrist. It’s an intense bit of kit, but, kind of like the Omega Ploprof, it might be just a bit too intense for me.

This baby tuna, on the other hand, is a lot more fun.

The 200m water resistance is all you’ll ever actually need, the super-toothy “monster” bezel is chunky and toolish but caged in the half shroud of the case. The samurai sword-and-arrow handset is pure class. 

And. Look. At. That. Dial.

The Kira Zuri dial is borrowed from Seiko’s smarter, much prettier sister, Grand Seiko, and its Morning Frost Spring Drive special edition.

It’s so delicate, and next to the thuggishly big boy bezel and case it’s just… You cannot possibly tell me this wouldn’t put a smile on your face around the pool.

Here’s the kicker: It’s less than $600.

Come on. You just don’t get better value for money than this. Ever.

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Mido Ocean Star Decompression Timer 1961 Limited Edition

This is the one that got away from me. Mido came out with a limited edition of this 1960s classic in 2020 and my number came up on the waiting list and I choked. Times were tight at home and I just wasn’t sure I could swing the $1,200 they were asking. 

I was an idiot.

No sooner than I passed, the whole run sold out and was soon trading at double sticker price on Chrono24. Last year they came out with a second version, in blue instead of black, but it just didn’t do it for me.

Here’s what I love about it: Almost everything.

That colorful, almost camp, circle in the middle of the dial is an actually incredibly legible chart for reading the amount of time you need to decompress after spending however long at different depths. It was a brilliant piece of 60s design, and it’s an incredibly inventive and easy to read way of presenting a lot of information in practically no space.

The bezel is counterclockwise, giving it a countdown function. Generally speaking, this just reads backwards to me and makes my eye twitch. But here it works to a purpose, counting down the different stages of decompression. 

And I love the minimized hour hand and dial and the extra long, slim minute hand cutting through to the outer chapter ring; the handset, the font, the proportions all just work — it’s fun without being any the less usuable for it.

You can still find them if you look around, and sometimes for under $2k.

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Look, there’s no good reason to spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on a brightly-colored dive watch you’ll only ever wear for half the year at best, and almost certainly will never actually take diving.

But that’s not the point. 

Strictly speaking, there’s no reason to spend any money on any watch. Or on anything you can’t get cheaper, made in China, and rolled out of plastic.

Sometimes, it’s just about bringing a smile to your face on a Wednesday.