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There are niche watches, and then there are niche watches. A dive watch on its own, if you think about, is a very specific kind of thing, and in spite of their incredible popularity, we shouldn’t forget that they’re built for a highly specific purpose that almost nobody wearing one will ever participate in. A vintage inspired dive watch with an alarm that can be heard underwater is even more specific, and a dive watch with an alarm that can be heard underwater and has been designed to imagine what an example of this watch might have looked like if it existed ten years before the actual watch it’s inspired by – well, that’s about as far down the rabbit hole as most will care to go. But that’s what Massena LAB and Vulcain have cooked up for their new collaboration, and it’s one of the strangest and most charming watches of the year.
The Vulcain Nautical Legacy Massena LAB can perhaps be most easily understood as a new spin on the Vulcain Nautical Cricket, which was revived last year. The watch we covered last summer was Vulcain’s attempt at bringing back a truly strange diver that takes a genuinely different approach to the very idea of “timing” a dive. The Nautical effectively brings the no-decompression table to the dial itself, and through the setting of the alarm and matching it with the dive’s depth, the diver can calculate the length of their decompression stops as they make their way to the surface. Again, truly niche, and an early example of the dive watch principle that is not really used much anymore given its complexity and the now ubiquitous dive computer that makes all these calculations automatically.
The idea behind this Massena LAB version of the Nautical is to imagine what the Cricket Nautical, which was introduced in 1961, would look like if it had been introduced in the early 1950s instead. I rather enjoy these thought experiments and think they’re something the folks at Massena LAB do a really nice job with. It’s a lot more interesting, in my view, than simply recreating a vintage watch. It allows a brand to tell new stories using old ideas with the freedom to improvise – unlike a straight recreation, no one can really say “but the original didn’t look like that.” This, of course, is entirely the point. It’s a fundamentally more creative exercise than simply regurgitating something that already exists, and I love the idea that Massena and his collaborators are building an “alternate watch reality.” I guess it appeals to the comic book fan in me, or the part of my brain that’s interested in theoretical physics.
For this edition, Massena LAB has chosen brown hues for the dial and many of the accents, which is meant to evoke the idea of a watch that spent a great deal of time in the sun and gone completely tropical. The handset has also been completely reimagined, with a baton hour hand, an oversized arrow for the minutes, a red arrow for the alarm hand, and a lollipop tipped hand for the central running seconds. The beige lume, which also suggests tropical aging, glows green and is meant to legible in dark water for enhanced legibility should an owner choose to use this watch for its intended purpose. Impressively, given the alarm complication, the case has a water resistance rating of 300 meters.
To use the Massena LAB version of the Nautical, the first step is for the wearer to determine the length and depth of an intended dive, which can be selected by rotating the crown at 4:00 to rotate the dial’s upper plate. The scale in the aperture will then reveal the length of the decompression stops a diver must make at nine, six, and three meters of depth. While perhaps not the most intuitive system, this kind of watch will have a lot of charm on the wrist of the right enthusiast simply for the novelty and the (partially) invented story behind it.
The Vulcain Nautical Legacy Massena LAB’s stainless steel case measures 42mm in diameter and is 17.5mm thick. That thickness is a result of the alarm complication, and a special “Triple Case Back’ system has been used here as a resonance chamber to allow the alarm to be heard underwater. The watch is mounted to a black rubber strap bearing a Vulcain logo. This is a limited edition of 25 pieces, and the retail price is $4,950. Massena LAB
