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“Watches, Stories, and Gear” is a weekly roundup of some our favorite watch content from Worn & Wound, great stories from around the web, and cool gear that we’ve got our eye on.
This week’s installment is brought to you by the Windup Watch Shop.
Watches
“Field Test: SCUBA Diving in Belize With Four Popular Dive Watches from Seiko, Oris, and Rado”
“I finally go SCUBA diving and am immediately vexed to learn that wearing a dive watch underwater can be considered far more pretentious than sporting one on dry land. I didn’t see that bit of irony coming when I happily hauled multiple dive watch reissues to a tiny island in Belize’s Turneffe Atoll, part of a significant coral World Heritage Site where I spent a week venturing into this incredible sport.
Indeed, if anyone groks the gratuitousness of dive watches, it’s divers themselves, all of whom use dive computers. So foreign are watches in today’s SCUBA scene that exactly zero of the many avid divers on my trip wore one, and my dive master—legitimately concerned I’d ruin the glimmering Rado Captain Cook on my wrist—reminded me to take it off as I kitted up for my first dive. I sheepishly explained, “Oh yeah, that. I’m actually going to wear a different watch each day we dive and write about them.” One of her eyebrows shot up, and then she broke into a melodic Belizean belly laugh.”
“Omega’s Black Sheep—a Look at the Speedmaster ‘Teutonic’”
“The Omega Speedmaster is an iconic watch, and its aesthetic is well known. The black dial with contrasting white markings and hands. The distinctive case profile with those twisted “lyre” lugs. That domed crystal rising above the inky, black tachymeter bezel.
Well, today we’re going to look at a Speedmaster that breaks out of this mold.
The Teutonic Speedmasters are a breed of their own—a collection of watches defined by their case shape, but in terms of dial and movement are pure Speedmaster. Intended for the German market, hence the playful “Teutonic” moniker, these watches were made in the early 1980s. It’s not quite clear what it was about that time and place that gave rise to such a wholesale change to a large chunk of the Speedmaster’s defining characteristics, but the result is interesting—a word I use deliberately.”
