| The Rolex Sea Dweller (£2270), in its oyster case, is good for dives to 1220m. It is designed for the diver who wants a watch that will out-do the diving achievements of anyone else he might meet in the bar. James Bond used his Rolex to good effect as a knuckle-duster. It's an all-time classic. The Sea Dweller has a perpetual movement and comes equipped with a helium escape-valve, so that none of the inert gas gets trapped inside its case during decompression, causing this valuable piece of jewellery to burst apart. But then few Sea Dweller owners are actually saturation divers | |
| The Citizen Promaster range, epitomised by the Analogue Aqualand, has been well received by an astute diving public. Its combination of watch and sophisticated depth gauge in either digital or analogue form is available at a price that many find acceptable and its Japanese quartz movement has proven its reliability over the years. It comes with all the alarms, bells and whistles you would expect from an instrument that is everything it can be in the area of electronic depth gauges, just stopping short of being a proper decompression computer. The latest arrival is the Aqualand Chronograph Eco-Drive (£325). It's powered by light, so it doesn't need a battery, and, in common with every Aqualand watch, is water resistant to 200m. |  |
| I always feel that the name Zenith sounds like an Eastern European brand. But nothing could be further from the truth. Zeniths come from Switzerland and, some would say, represent the acme of watchmakers' achievements, with a mechanical movement that rivals modern Japanese electronic quartz for time-keeping qualities. The Zenith Rainbow Flyback (£1995) is a chronograph that can be reset and restarted with just a single push of a button. It is rated to 100m and looks very pretty with its colourful dial. |  |
| With a name like Blancpain 50 Fathoms, this diver's watch sounds as though it's designed for French divers who want to know when to come up for baguettes and a glass of wine! For this fine piece of jewellery in stainless steel, rated to 300m, the would-be purchaser must part with a gob-smacking £4650 before he can sport it in the pub. It has a perpetual self-winding movement with 100 hours' reserve, because in the tradition of all fine watches it runs on clockwork! |  |
| Not cheap, but far less expensive at £980 and with an equally fine pedigree, the Breitling Colt SuperOcean will go to 1000m and is made to the specification demanded by US Navy Seals. If it's the plainer, understated look you're after, the GST Aquatimer is made in a combination of titanium and stainless steel. It has a massive dial, but little else to give a clue to the casual observer that you spent as much as £2375 on it. It's rated to 200 bar of pressure which means nearly 2000m! |  |
| Casio made its name in Europe in the '60s with its pocket calculators. How could VAT ever have been introduced if it weren't for Casio? Its electronic movements are now fitted to a host of own-brand watches and it claims to be the biggest branded watch manufacturer in the world. For divers it produces the Marine Range and the Casio DEP610, a combined depth gauge and watch in a digital form. At around £350, the Casio DEP610 is a complex-looking beast that will satisfy even the keenest techno-bore! Rated to 200m, its key feature is its illuminated display. The watch measures temp-erature and gives maximum depth and average depth achieved during a dive, dive-start and dive-ending times, and the surface interval. |  |
| The Seiko Pulsar Solar Diver's Watch is also made of titanium but costs only £175. It's rated to 200m, and runs on solar power which may seem a bit pointless in Britain's murky waters, but Seiko assures us that only three hours' exposure in bright sunshine gives it a power reserve of nearly six months. |  |
| Traser watches use high-tech chemistry to provide a luminous dial said to be 100 times brighter than the best luminous paint. Made in Switzerland, their movements are electronic quartz and they run on a commercial-type battery. With more than 200,000 watches in the US military illuminated by Traser technology, watches similar to the Traser S3007 (£125) are standard issue to US Navy Seals. They were also chosen by the British support team for Olivier Isler's world cave-dive record attempt at La Doux de Coly in the Dordogne region of France and it doesn't get much darker than that! |  |
| Another cave-diving team, this time members of the Dragon 98 Cave Diving Expedition, who tackled the caver's "Everest" in Turkey, chose to equip themselves with the Arctic Pro Diver watch, which uses a Japanese Citizen quartz movement. Packed with more features but rated to just 100m (less than the Pro Diver's 300m), the Arctic Chrono 100TT has three secondary dials, including a stop-watch function calibrated to one-twentieth of a second. It looks to be a lot of watch for its £99 asking price and took its place alongside much more expensive watches in this line-up. Alas, Arctic should have charged more the company went into receivership just as we were about to go to press! |  |
| Omega has had a close association with diving since the exploratory voyages of the deep-diving submersible Nautile in the '60s. Now, in a bid to be associated with more contemporary and modern-thinking icons, Piers Brosnan, the James Bond of Tomorrow Never Dies can be seen wearing an Omega Seamaster in the film. Back in the realms of reality, Jacques Mayol wore a Seamaster during his world-record free-dive to 101m in 1981. Seamasters come either with electronic quartz or watchmaker's perpetual movements, and the Omega Seamaster GMT (£1150) is self-winding and rated to 300m. It has a spectacular design that escapes the Rolex look-alike school of thought. It's called the GMT because a special feature is its second time-zone display useful for the travelling diver. |  |
| Sector made its name as the watch worn by those who do things like walk alone across the Antarctic, descend rapids at 75mph, kayak over waterfalls or jump out of aeroplanes at 10,000m without oxygen. Solo Swiss cave-diver Olivier Isler has been sponsored by Sector, as have both Pipin and Umberto Pelizzari when they made their death-defyingly deep record-breaking free-dives. The Sector Diving Team 1000 automatic chronograph watch (£1149), with its matt grey titanium-alloy case, is water resistant to 1000m and looks it. In fact, it's such a mighty piece of metal that even the screw-down crown looks as though you should take a spanner to it. |  |
| Instead of adding a depth-gauge function to a watch design, Suunto has taken an entirely different approach. It now makes one of its diving computers so small that it can double as a watch albeit a rather chunky one. The Suunto Advanced Computer Watch does everything (and more) that its larger sibling the Suunto Solution diving computer does but for £499 it tells the time too! In fact, it's more a full-function decompression computer masquerading as a watch than the contrary. However, if you don't mind wearing a digital watch that is a little on the large side, this watch will give you everything you need as a diver, with the added bonus that you can go over previous dives, blow by blow, in the pub! |  |
| On the subject of value for money, the Accurist Diver's Watch is well worth its £199 and offers everything you need, including a stop-watch function. It is rated to 200m, has a depth-gauge function calibrated to 50m, and its white dial option is eminently readable underwater. |  |
| TAG Heuer has an enviable reputation in the sporting watch world and quite rightly so. It has supplied the instrumentation to the official time-keeper at numerous prestigious sports events. The recently arrived Tag Heuer 2000 Sport diver's watch is an example of restrained good taste and is watertight for pressures encountered down to a depth of 200m. It represents relatively good value at £450 and is arguably one of the best-looking watches in our line-up. |  |
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Accurist 0171 447 3900 Blancpain, Breitling, IWC (supplied by Wempe Jewellers) 0171 493 2299 Casio 0181 450 9131 Citizen 01189 890333 Omega 01703 646800 |
Rolex 0171 629 5071 Sector 0171 242 5370 Seiko 01628 770988 Suunto 01923 801572 TAG Heuer 0171 371 6166 Traser 07000 872737 Zenith 0181 891 4391 |
