#Aqua extreme bonaire professional#

Though, ironically, the Aquadive’s bonafides as a tool make it an even cooler fashion statement for some of us. Its design is an accumulation of small improvements that add up to a seriously capable dive watch, and not some fashion statement. You can’t fast-forward that evolution it’s just too much hard-earned RnD - year in, year out - for anyone to imitate.Īnd that’s exactly why you’d choose an Aquadive for diving. Right - you chose the Rover because that company had been perfecting tough, capable off-road vehicles when Cadillac was still building land yachts. Consider whether you’d prefer a Cadillac SUV or a Land Rover Defender for actual off-road driving. The reason the Bathyscaphe is so rugged goes back to Aquadive’s history of designing exclusively purpose-built dive watches. Meanwhile the Aquadive Bathyscaphe takes a serious beating unscathed. Some watches might look like badass divers, but they ultimately succumb to damage in real diving conditions. of lead weights around my waist as ocean waves blithely toss me to and fro. The abuse arises when hoisting heavy aluminum tanks into the back of pickup trucks, reaching an arm through a buoyancy compensation device (BCD) and straight into some hard bit of boat rigging, or lifting myself onto a concrete slab with 16 lbs. I’ve scratched a couple sapphire watch crystals and banged up my share of bezels, and I’ve only done that while SCUBA diving. Better yet, it loves to go deep, and it looks entirely at home snaking around the jagged edges of a sunken freighter, tunneling through a coral cave, or coming face-to-face with a shark.ĭiving off the Dutch island Bonaire for a week, and again off of Grand Cayman for a few days (both in the Western Caribbean), the Bathyscaphe proved to be a most trusty companion underwater and above. It doesn’t look entirely out of place with a casual, rugged outfit (let’s say a work shirt, jeans, and boots), but the Bathyscaphe really begs to be worn in and around the water. The Aquadive Bathyscaphe is just such a rarity. Today’s dive watches are so often marketed as fashion statements that it’s become relatively rare for a company to design one as a straight-up, thoroughbred diving tool. The newly designed Aquadive Bathyscaphe is the brand’s current flagship model, and this new watch is loosely based on that large watch with the depth gauge, the legendary Aquadive Model 50.

Those are all gone now, so today Aquadive produces its cases in Germany, and it sources its movements and performs assembly in Switzerland. In 2011, avid dive watch collector Rick Marei brought Aquadive back to life, first with watches built into new-old-stock cases he acquired along with the company. But Aquadive, like so many other watch brands, didn’t survive the ascendency of electronic quartz watches.

#Aqua extreme bonaire professional#

Aquadive made a wide assortment of models, from snorkeling watches to enormous electronic models with oil-filled depth gauges for professional divers.

These purpose-driven timepieces were standard fare among SCUBA divers who would see them in magazine ads, in local dive shops, or on the wrists of their fellow divers. This time, we’re off the coast of Bonaire in the Caribbean with the Aquadive Bathyscaphe.īack in the 1960s, Aquadive built dive watches, and only dive watches. Welcome to Deep Dive, in which we test dive watches both new and vintage beneath the waves in some of the world’s most beautiful locations.