Writing for periodicals can often seem like creating a sand mandala, one of those large intricate, patterned circles painstakingly brought to life by Tibetan Buddhist monks. The monks might work for days or weeks on them, and then when complete, cast them into the wind as an acknowledgment of the transient nature of life itself. OK, I’m being a bit dramatic. But I often lament that the work I put into a story for a magazine is relevant—and read—for a few weeks before it’s thrown in the recycle bin, forgotten and lost to the merciless march of time. Of course, in my vanity, I save my stories, in PDF and text and images, and sometimes pull them up to read again, and relive an adventure.
One such story was my trip to the Galapagos Islands, courtesy of the International Watch Company. For a number of years, IWC had a relationship with the Charles Darwin Foundation, a science and environmental organization based in the islands made famous by the British biologist and writer. Aside from the financial benefits to the foundation that came from the partnership, some beautiful marketing content was produced (including this great short film), not to mention some pretty special watches. One of those watches was the Aquatimer Deep Three, IWC’s third generation depth gauge equipped diving watch. In 2014, I was invited to the Galapagos to dive with this timepiece, and I wrote a story about it for Revolution magazine. I’m re-publishing it again here, hopefully for your enjoyment.
The bow of the dive boat was angling precariously close to the jagged rocks of Bartolomé Island and the big outboards strained in reverse as we clamored onto the gunwales. The combination of heavy dive gear and four-foot swells made balancing difficult. I checked my regulator one last time and then at the count of three, the four of us back-rolled in unison into the foamy water. By the time I bobbed to the surface, I has already been swept in front of the boat and I swiveled around to find the others. Our guide gave the thumbs-down and we all deflated our buoyancy vests and quickly descended. The strong currents here demanded a lot of lead and I sank like a stone, equalizing my sinuses as I kicked for the bottom.
I glanced at the IWC Aquatimer Deep Three on my wrist; its depth gauge needle indicated 15 meters already yet the surge was still strong. Our group rendezvoused at an outcrop of rock, our trail of exhaled bubbles going sideways in the three-knot current. This was tough diving yet the rewards were worth the effort. The day before, at Seymour Norte, we had swum with countless sharks of four different species, a flock of eagle rays and huge schools of baitfish. Now I caught my breath and scanned the hazy water for life. As if on cue, the familiar profile of a scalloped hammerhead shark cruised past, oblivious to the current. Welcome to the Galapagos Islands.
Galapagos is a fitting place to test out the latest IWC dive watches for several reasons. First of all, the diving here is challenging and demands not only sharp skills but the best equipment. Secondly, IWC Schaffhausen has a special connection with these islands, having been a longtime supporter of the Charles Darwin Foundation, a research and environmental organization based here. And finally, the Galapagos is known as the birthplace of Darwin’s theories on natural selection and origins of species; the latest Aquatimers themselves are the latest evolution of IWC’s dive watch line that dates back to 1967. I had been diving with examples of two previous iterations of Aquatimer and it was three years ago that I tested the line’s last generation chronograph for the very first Bottom Time column. Now I had come full circle to test Darwin’s theories underwater with the latest version. Had the new timepieces further adapted and evolved or gone the way of so many vestigial dive watches, mere relics in an age of digital dive computers?
Diving in strong currents is much like moving in high winds. Staying streamlined and low to the ground minimizes the effort required to swim and our small group picked its way from one rocky outcrop to another, pausing to rest in their leeward shadows to scan for wildlife. Where there was no shelter from the current, I clung to a jagged knob of rock, my legs trailing behind me like a flag and my mask being tugged sideways. Moving forward was less swimming than it was crawling hand over hand, careful not to cut fingers on the sharp volcanic rocks. I cursed my decision to leave gloves behind.
While the currents in the Galapagos make for tough diving, they are also what make it so rewarding. After all, it is these currents that bring such a bounty of underwater life there. Despite their position smack dab on the Equator, which makes the islands hot and arid, the waters that swirl around them are cold, brought up from the Southern Ocean and mixing with the cross-Pacific currents. The islands themselves are current or extinct volcanic cones rising from the sea floor in the middle of the Pacific, so when these blending currents hit their sloping flanks, they’re forced to the surface, creating even more turbulence. Amidst all of this is a stew of plankton, which in turn brings huge schools of feeding fish of all shapes and sizes and divers are able to witness the entire food chain, from bottom to top, all in one 60-minute dive.
IWC Schaffhausen has always been known as an engineering-driven company and the Aquatimer perhaps its greatest showcase. While IWC’s earliest dive watches were simple creatures housed in the same twin-crown Super Compressor cases as many other divers of the 1960s and ‘70s, the Aquatimer really came into its own as a unique species in the 1980s. This was when the German Navy came to Schaffhausen for timepieces for its combat and mine clearance divers. The resulting watch was the now-legendary Ocean 2000, a minimalist masterpiece designed by Porsche Design, rendered in titanium and water resistant to a crushing 2,000 meters. It became a design icon.
By the ‘90s, the Porsche Design partnership was over and the GST line of dive watches emerged. With this new family came the Deep One. This watch featured IWC’s familiar Teutonic design cues but added perhaps the most useful function a diver could ask for: a mechanical depth gauge. Designed by then-IWC engineer, Richard Habring, the Deep One had an opening on its side that actually allowed water to flow into its case, where the pressure drove a center-mounted needle. This arrangement required modifying the watch’s mechanical movement so the sweep seconds were in a subdial at 6:00. The watch was sold with a small pump that could be used to test the function of the depth gauge without getting wet. The GST Deep One was ahead of its time, a bit finicky, and sold in limited numbers, perhaps due to a dwindling target market of divers who had moved on to digital dive computers. But it remains an important ancestor in the Aquatimer’s lineage.
From a perch at 20 meters, I scanned the blue distance for sharks and rays. A day earlier, we dove off of another island, Seymour Norte, and lost count of the sharks we saw there. The waters surrounding the Galapagos Islands are a protected marine reserve and is one of the last best places on Earth to dive with sharks. The far northern islands of Wolf and Darwin teem with migrating whale sharks and schools of hammerheads that number in the hundreds. At Seymour Norte, we saw a healthy school of more than dozen of the alien-looking hammerheads, in addition to chunky Galapagos sharks, blacktips and the slender and docile whitetips. But Bartolomé is known more for its resident sea lion colony and, as if on schedule, two sleek shapes corkscrewed into view. These were small females and they seemed curious and playful. Seemingly immune to the strong current that had us divers clinging to rocks to keep from drifting out into the open ocean, the sea lions caroused at will among us, darting in and out from under a rock overhang, posing for our cameras before disappearing into the boiling froth at the surface for air.
IWC’s second generation depth gauge watch, the Aquatimer Deep Two, improved on its predecessor, dispensing with the Bourdon tube design and internal timing bezel. The case had swollen to 46 millimeters and sported an outer rotating sapphire bezel. Instead of deliberately flooding the case, a port on the side of the case allowed water access to a pressure-sensing membrane that drove a rack and pinion system to move the depth gauge needles (current and maximum depth) on the watch dial; the sweep seconds was back on the center pinion. The overall design was burlier and the watch much more reliable than the primordial Deep One yet it lacked the clean lines of its predecessor. Also, IWC had moved away from titanium as a case material, to the disappointment of many who saw the material as inseparable from the company that pioneered its use. The Dee Two was an exceptional dive watch but there was still room for improvement.
On the choppy two-hour boat ride out to Bartolomé, I slowly prepared for diving. This is a deliberate exercise, one each diver does in a silent ritual: slide the buoyancy vest onto the tank, tighten down the first stage yoke, turn on the air and check pressure and regulator function , confirm weights and finally clip all hoses and gauges into place. Then it’s time to suit up. I slithered into my 6.5-millimeter hooded wetsuit, which was still damp and tacky from the previous day. On one wrist, I strapped my digital dive computer, on the other, the Aquatimer Deep Three. I pressed the push-piece to reset the maximum depth needle from yesterday’s 19-meter setting. Far from a mere novelty, the addition of a depth gauge to a dive watch makes it a relevant backup instrument. It may be a cliche, but batteries do fail, straps break and if a digital display goes dark, a diver has no depth or time reference. Smart divers always have a secondary gauge and bottom timer. The Deep Three puts both on one wrist.
The new watch would make Darwin proud. It is the culmination of everything IWC Schaffhausen has learned about building dive watches to date and its evolutionary perfection is evident. Here is titanium again, the perfect metal from which to build a dive watch—corrosion resistant, lightweight and extremely strong. The bezel system is all new and the most distinguishing feature of the new generation of Aquatimer. It combines the cleaner look of the old Aquatimers with better functionality. The elapsed timing ring once again sits under the sapphire crystal, protected and closer to the minute hand for precise readoff. Yet rather than making use of a finicky and leak-prone crown to turn it, IWC engineered a new clutch mechanism, called SafeDive, by which the timing ring is turned via an outer rotating bezel. It works brilliantly; the bezel turns both ways while the one-way ratchet only allows the timing ring to rotate anti-clockwise to prevent an accident bump from adding time to a dive. In a deliberate nod to its illustrious ancestry, the bezel’s design echoes that of the Ocean 2000.
Even the Deep Three’s rubber strap is perfectly suited for underwater use. Its accordion-style vents can be pulled taut and stretched over a wetsuit; at depth, when water pressure compresses a neoprene sleeve, the vents then contract to take up the slack and keep the strap tight on the wrist. The new Aquatimer family keeps the quick-release strap system of the previous generation but adds a set of strap bars. While these bars lack shoulders and thus aren’t removable with a standard tool, thy do allow for the use of a one-piece nylon strap, an option many divers will appreciate.
The depth gauge mechanism of the Deep Three is largely carried over from the Deep Two and remains the best of breed in the rarified world of mechanical depth gauge watches. Two needles, one blue, one red, track both current depth and maximum depth, the latter reading being critical to calculating no-decompression times and later logging of a dive. One improvement to the new mechanism is the ability to fine tune the gauge. A small thumb wheel on the left side of the case can be turned to align the zero position of the depth markers. It’s an unlikely need but IWC left nothing to chance with this latest flagship diver.
In my peripheral vision, silhouetted against the bright surface, I saw a much larger sea lion angling towards our ledge. Its bulk suggested a male and we had been warned to keep an eye on these protective alphas. Sure enough, the graceful giant was aggressive, scattering the coy females and brushing by us with authority. At one point, he stopped directly in front of me, his big eyes meeting mine. We were two mammals looking at each other, one perfectly adapted for this environment, the other ill-suited. In a show of force, he opened his mouth and barked in my face, a rush of bubbles exhaled towards me as if to say, “you don’t belong here” before swimming away. A glance at my Deep Three told me the same. At 20 meters, I’d have a maximum of 60 minutes before requiring decompression time and the minute hand crept towards the bezel’s 50 mark. Following the group, I let go of the rocks and let the current take me out towards the blue where we slowly ascended.
At five meters, I leveled off and drifted, twisting the Aquatimer’s bezel to time to my three-minute safety stop. Our guide inflated a yellow marker buoy and I watched it unfurl like a slow motion kite, towards the surface to signal the boat to come and fetch us. The rocks of the island were well behind us, only thousand of miles of Pacific in view now as we drifted further offshore. Looking down, I caught sight of two huge mobula rays flapping gracefully below up, arcing up and down in the current, mouths open to swallow up plankton before disappearing into the blue. Time was up and I let myself rise to the surface. Farewell, Galapagos.