DEAD SECONDS: Nobody Really Needs A 1,000-Meter Dive Watch. Or Do They?

When I was a kid, I spent my summers on the Croatian coast diving for sea urchins. I would go down a few meters with a mask, pull them off the rocks and come back up, and it never occurred to me to wear a watch. Why would I, right? But those dives are still more or less the deepest I have ever been, and I suspect the same is true for most people reading this, including plenty who own a dive watch rated to 300 or 500 meters. I bring it up because I want to argue something odd for a person who complains about oversized watches as often as I do, which is that the most honest dive watch Rolex makes today is also its most ridiculous one.

That watch is the Deepsea Challenge. It is 50mm wide and 23mm thick, it weighs around 250 grams even though the case is titanium, and it is rated to 11,000 meters, which is slightly deeper than the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Rolex released it in 2022, wants $26,000 for it, and it is based on an experimental watch that reached the bottom of the trench in 2012, strapped to the robotic arm of James Cameron’s submarine. Rolex doesn’t pretend that anyone will dive with it. Let alone strap one to the outside of their submersible on their next trip to the Mariana Trench. The company sells the Deepsea Challenge the way a carmaker shows off a concept car, as proof of what it is capable of building, and I find that refreshingly honest

The watches that bother me sit in the middle of the range. I mean, it's not a huge scam or a global conspiracy, but those in the middle are kind of pretending to be more than they actually are. The regular Rolex Deepsea, reference 136660, is rated to 3,900 meters. It uses the same calibre 3230 as the Submariner 124060, but the Submariner is 41mm wide and 12.5mm thick, while the Deepsea is 44mm wide and 17.7mm thick. That is more than five extra millimeters for a depth no human diver will reach, and yet the watch is sold as a tool, with no winks or tongue-in-cheeks. Omega’s Planet Ocean 600M comes with a helium escape valve, a part designed for saturation divers who live under pressure for weeks at a time (the Comex story in this issue explains where it came from), even though recreational diving stops at 40 meters. For years, my position on these watches was that I wanted either an honest 100-meter diver or an openly absurd 11,000-meter one, and that everything in between served nobody.

When I tried to work out who those middle watches are actually made for, though, the uncomfortable answer was us. Brands keep printing 600 and 1,000 meters on their dials because enthusiasts punish them when they don’t. When a brand releases a good-looking diver with 100 meters of water resistance, it doesn’t take long for someone online to call it a desk diver. I have done my own version of this. In October 2023, writing about the Certina DS Super PH1000M, I said its helium escape valve “indicates this is a serious diver. It sure is. As the name suggests, it can go down to 1,000 meters.” I meant that as praise, and I gave the watch credit for a number that almost nobody who bought it would ever use. Multiply that reaction across every forum, comment section and YouTube review, and you end up with a 17.7mm Deepsea. A lot of the people who complain that dive watches have become too thick are the same people who made them that way.

The longer I thought about it, however, the less convinced I was that any of this needs fixing. Watch enthusiasts already accept plenty of fiction without complaint. The Omega Speedmaster sells largely on the fact that some previous generation of the current watch went to the Moon, and nobody buying one expects to go there. I studied film, and the closest comparison I know is a movie set. A Western town on a studio backlot is a row of facades with nothing behind the doors, but nobody watching the film feels cheated, because the facade is doing exactly the job it was built for. A depth rating works the same way. It tells a story about a watch that could survive somewhere hostile, but doesn't have to.

Depth ratings on watches sold to ordinary buyers are fiction, and I think that fiction is one of the most enjoyable things about collecting watches. What I do object to is the pretending on both sides. Brands pretend when they market a 3,900-meter watch as professional equipment to people who will mostly wear it to dinner, and enthusiasts pretend when they dismiss a 100-meter diver as fake because it doesn’t sell the same story. If you love the Deepsea, buy it and enjoy it for what it is, an overbuilt and slightly ridiculous tribute to the deep ocean, but it will be near impossible to convince me that it's a tool you need. And the next time a brand releases a slim diver with 100 meters on the dial, please don’t be the person in the comments asking whether it is a real dive watch. Hardly any of them are anymore, and that was never the reason we bought them.