Latest Review
Having lived so far away from us, I have very few memories of my grandfather before his passing. Other than the fact that he was a regular at the local Legion in rural Indiana and liked having westerns on the TV, my memories are mostly sensory: the smell of tobacco, the first sip of beer he let me have when I was still a kid. I can only imagine he, too, considered me a stranger who just happened to share a last name and a few chromosomes here and there. Even still, every year, he would give me a Clive Cussler book. He knew I was a reader, but he was not. My guess is that, in some ways, he wanted me to read the books he would have read, to tell the stories he would have liked. He just never got around to it, I suppose.
This is my first memory of Cussler’s books. And while I have read a few of them, mostly when I was younger as a sort of favor to my grandfather, I don’t remember many of the plots. I remember more of who Cussler was as a person: born in the Midwest between the wars, a veteran, and later an author and maritime explorer. My grandfather shared some of those same biographical details, but their lives diverged somewhere in adulthood. Cussler felt like a parallel version of the life my grandfather could have lived – had debt, circumstance, and the family farm not gotten in the way.
I was reminded of all of this when DOXA released the new SUB 300 Ti5 Clive Cussler, a limited edition introduced on what would have been Cussler’s 95th birthday. Cussler brought DOXA to readers through Dirk Pitt, his most famous character who’d worn a DOXA SUB throughout the novels. For this release, DOXA returns to the SUB 300, the original 1967 model that helped to define the brand’s dive watch legacy.
For this new iteration, DOXA has remade the case, crown, and screw-down caseback in Grade 5 titanium, bringing the material back to the collection while retaining many of the features that defined the original model. The watch keeps the familiar SUB 300 shape (and its 42.5mm case), along with 300 meters of water resistance, DOXA’s unidirectional dual-scale bezel, and the oversized orange minute hand.
The dial, too, has been given a facelift with its two-layer construction. Both layers are made from the same Grade 5 titanium as the case, with the lower dial carrying the Super-LumiNova hour markers and minute track. The upper dial is then laser-cut so those elements show through from underneath for a little bit of depth and dimension to the overall presentation.
Most interesting about this watch, for me, are the Easter Eggs that pay tribute to the late novelist. The date window at 3 o’clock shows the numerals 15, 7, and 31 in DOXA orange, referencing his birth date of July 15, 1931. The titanium caseback carries the NUMA emblem, the COSC certification, and the individual numbering for each watch. Part of the proceeds will also support NUMA, the National Underwater and Marine Agency, the nonprofit Cussler founded in 1979 to search for and preserve historic shipwrecks.
The SUB 300 Ti5 Clive Cussler is powered by the Sellita SW200-1, and promises approximately 38 hours of power reserve. The watch comes on a black Dive Flex rubber strap with a perforated pattern inspired by tropical dive straps of the 1960s.
The DOXA SUB 300 Ti5 Clive Cussler is available now through DOXA’s website with a pricetag of $3,390. The release is limited to just 300 pieces. DOXA
