Rolex

SJX
[Purist]
8540

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Why I miss the Sea-Dweller and its outgoing brethren

For most of its life the Sea-Dweller never sold particularly well because it was too thick and too heavy for the ordinary consumer. And the Submariner could be bought for less and it looked nearly identical. In fact, on the secondary market the Sea-Dweller 16600 went for almost the same as the Submariner 16610 for the longest time.

Then in 2008 Rolex replaced the Sea-Dweller with the colossal Sea-Dweller Deep Sea, sparking off a rabid but brief frenzy as folks fell over themselves to acquire the departed Sea-Dweller. But deliveries of the Sea-Dweller continued until mid-2009, with the last being V-series Sea-Dwellers delivered in 2009 (Rolex collectors track the serial number letters with an embarrassing obsession), which were the absolute last of the Sea-Dweller.

Often one sees the Sea-Dweller being described as being “over engineered”. I dispute that. The Sea-Dweller was an elegant and sufficient solution to a problem, while the neurotically over engineered DeepSea appears to be an answer to a question no one asked.

But in some respects the Sea-Dweller is only adequate or even insufficient; the bracelet, for example, could be a lot better. Yet the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The story of the Sea-Dweller is well known: the watch was originally conceived for Compagnie Maritime d'Expertise, better known as COMEX, a French deep-sea engineering firm. The first watches provided to COMEX were stock Rolex ref. 5513 Submariners with a helium escape valve drilled into the side of the case; this was necessary for saturation diving as helium would enter the watch case and require release during decompression.

From 1970 to 1997 Rolex supplied COMEX with a variety of Sea-Dweller and Submariner models, all of which are outrageously valuable today. Nearly all the models supplied to COMEX (except the ref. 5514) were also sold to civilians with the only difference being the lack of the COMEX lettering and numbers on the dial and back.

Rolex’s partnership with COMEX was arguably the last of relationships that created watches made for specific professions. Those included the collaboration with Pan American Airways, which produced the GMT-Master, as well as the Royal Navy and resulting military Submariner. PanAm no longer exists while COMEX has been taken over. Rolex has survived and prospered but it has evolved and makes a different kind of watch.

The Sea-Dweller, along with the Explorer I and II and the steel Submariners, is thus one of the last remnants of the Rolex of the last century, when the company made fairly serious watches for serious minded folk. Oddly enough, the most distinctive feature of these old-style watches is their rinky dink bracelets.

Such bracelets were acceptable forty years ago when the Oyster bracelet was introduced but times changed and they did not. They possess contemptible stamped steel clasps and hollow centre links, and have long been derided by collectors as the weak link in a Rolex sports watch. Yet these bracelets do their job well with little fuss.

For the longest time the Sea-Dweller had the best bracelet of all the sports Rolex watches, it was thicker, heavier and generally more solid, and it even sported the much vaunted solid end links since the eighties. As a testament to how glacially Rolex evolves, it took the company another 20 years to add solid end links to the bracelets of the other sports watches.

The old style sports watches stand in stark contrast to the current range of Rolex sports models which are beautifully built and beautifully polished. The new spring-loaded clasp found in the GMT-Master II and other sports models is a brilliant design. But the whole watch is so well made and so shiny it feels almost jewel-like, more for passengers in first class than the pilots – not that most Rolex wearers were pilots or deep sea divers.

As a wise friend of mine pointed out, sand and grit accumulated from diving and other rigorous activities could be rinsed off easily and the old clasp wouldn’t be any worse for the wear; imagine grains of sand getting stuck in the new spring-loaded clasp and the scraping and scratching that would ensure.

Rumours abound that the current steel Submariners and Explorers will be replaced at Baselworld 2010. Imperfect as they are, the outgoing Rolex models have a quaint charm that is extremely and mysteriously compelling. They will be missed.

- SJX

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