Watches in the Wild (Daylight Savings Blues and Absolutely Shameless Plugs, Volume 58)

Disclaimer: JLC on the day

This is the fifty eighth(ish) in a semi-regular digest of cool watches I happened to see this week.

Past posts in this series have been hashtagged to #watchesinthewild.

As always, my general policy is that I never ask for wrist shots (because approaching strangers and distant acquaintances to talk about watches is already weird enough) so all pictures below are sourced from the internet. People are mostly cool, I try not to annoy them.

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If there is one thing that we as Americans can get behind, it's how hideously awful Daylight Savings is. I hate changing my clocks.  I hate changing the watches.  My kids still aren't adjusted time wise and have graced me and my wife with several midnight visits this week. It feels like jetlag, except I didn't manage to go anywhere fun.

Work caught up to me last week and I've been a little lax in finding cool watches to highlight here. That said, I did see some fun stuff and a couple of cool stories to tell.

But first a shameless plug.  Have I mentioned I am running a charitable giveaway?  Ends tomorrow noon PT!  Win my Nodus Sector Deep!

https://www.watchcrunch.com/Edge168n/posts/another-diver-bites-the-dust-make-a-donation-win-a-nodus-sector-deep-blue-orthodox-351625

And a couple of respots (or iterations) to wet the whistle.

Moonswatch Pluto

Seen on the wrist of a friend of a friend.  The OEM strap was discarded and replaced with a burgundy red leather.  It looked good, maybe the best styling of the Mission to Short Term Profits I've ever seen.

SKX007

Seen on the wrist of the captain of a chartered cruise in the SF Bay.  No conversation.

Sinn 104

On the wrist of an old friend.  We did not talk watches that day, though before saying hello he did grab my wrist immediately to see what I was wearing.  That's real deal watch friendship right there.

Casio G-Shock DW5610MT-1 Mixtape

Seen on the wrist of a dad at school.  Did not ask about it but have admired his multicolored G-shock game from afar. There will be conversation had at some point.

Rolex GMT Master II "Sprite"

Seen at a kids birthday, on the left wrist of an old Asian man.  On his other wrist?  A no Date sub. I had to ask about it and did.

In our conversation, he gave me a toothy grin and wondered if I knew about Schwarzkopfing.  Besides, how else was he going to tell the time in four times zones.  My man!

This is notably the first Sprite I've seen in metal outside of a boutique. 

Having talked about various iterations of the GMT Master II before, I find little more than the crown orientation of this watch particularly noteworthy.

But it does spring to mind, whenever I ponder hype cycles in watches and what drives them.  According to Watch charts (reasonably authoritative pricing wise)=, secondary market prices for the Sprite are still about $2k higher than those of the contemporaneous Batgirl and I can't, for the life of me, understand why.

I mean, I DO understand why. They made many more Batgirls than Sprites (I am told down the right lefty split) so this is just a supply and demand thing.  Less supply, higher prices.

But the demand side of the equation is still a mystery to me. For me (a righty if you must know), a destro watch is a novelty.  I very very rarely see right handed individuals wear destro watches.

I know some of you out there are adamant that a pointy crown ruins the experience of a watch worn righty up against the hand.  To this I say, you deserve better than that.  Live a little, wear your watches looser.

Anyway.  The Sprite was duly seen and duly pondered.  Another for the bingo card.

PAM000127 -1950 limited edition

Seen on the wrist of a senior investment professional at a major university endowment during a meeting where he was complaining about how none of the PE firms he poured cash into during 2019-2021 was exiting their positions so he was facing a liquidity crunch on his portfolio.

As a public equity manager who has endured many  lectures on the virtues of how private equity manages to deliver these amazing returns and all you give up is liquidity.

 I can't criticize his taste in watches though.  This is a masterpiece.

Whenever I see a Panerai, my eyes tend to glaze over a bit. The case shapes are iconic but samey.  The dials are a little hard to distinguish from each other.  They are extremely large watches that are well designed enough to simply wear like very large watches.

Yet, Panerai rewards attention to the details. Witness @valleykilmers and his PAM346 (titanium Radiomir with gold hands.

As for the details of this relatively common looking Luminor, I point you to gold hands, spare no date sandwicj dial and that crazy domed sapphire crystal.thst casts distortions at the corners of the dial.  This is a Panerai that makes other Panerais look flat.

There's a long history in this watch that I won't go into.  I refer you to perezscope who wrote the definitive history of this thing.

https://perezcope.com/2018/02/15/pam-127-the-origins-of-the-fiddy/ 

It's fun, and good looking and absolutely gigantic.

Everose Yachtmaster on Oysterflex

Seen on the wrist of a man in my office who looked like a K-Pop star (he had the Park Jimin hair flip). 

Given he was Asian and a bit waifish, I frankly couldn't tell you his age at a glance, whether 14 or 45.  Anyway, did not get to have a conversation.

Two weeks ago, I bothered everyone about how the Rolex Explorer 2 in Arctic was the last toolish Rolex in the catalog. Today, I'm going to enrage everyone by talking about how Rolex is actually just one of two watches: a Submariner or a Date just.  

You know it to be true.

GMT Master? Fancy Sub.

OP? Peasant DJ

Sea Dweller? Submariner that could go on a diet.

Daytona? DJ with pushers.

And the Yachtmaster is the pretty pretty princess of all the Submariner variants and this particular Yachtmaster being the prettiest princess of all.

Now, if you think this is me being mean to the Yachty, I gotta tell you...I actually love how dumb this watch is and how much the watch press falls over backwards to talk about how this is luxurious but not blingy.  Let not the groupthink of the watch press fool you, a gold dive watch is always going to be blingy and let us not forget, Rolex is at its very best when it abandons any pretense at toolishness and embraces the inner bling monster that it always wanted to be.

And this watch is that attitude in spades.  Ceramic bezel, not for durability, but for the flex of showing how even though ceramic basically impossible to machine after being cast, somehow Rolex managed to make raised textured numbers.

A fully gold case, but a rubber strap with a titanium core to make it sporty....except they forgot and made a rose gold clasp that's going to get chewed up anyway.

This watch is such a silly flex and I find it absolutely HILARIOUS.

Alpina Carree Automatic

Seen on the wrist of an older woman at a school function.  I immediately abandoned my wife and wandered over and asked her if that was the limited edition Alpina Heritage Carree Mechanical with the new old stock movement and if it was could I just hold it to feel special?

She looked surprised at my genial forwardness, then responded very ruefully in a Dutch accent.  "I wish!  When Fratello dropped their article on them, I immediately tried to buy one.  I would have preferred the silver case much more!"

She explained that she settled for the more ubiquitous automatic because of how much she loved the stepped case and the old art deco feeling of the entire thing.  I told her that I loved the watch and then asked if we could be watch friends.  She laughed.  I am going to assume that that's a yes.

I am almost as excited spotting as female collector as I am managing to spot this not at all common Alpina, which, if I'm going to be completely honest, was perhaps a touch large for her wrist.

I have no idea what I actually think about Alpina the brand.  I find most of the range somewhat anonymous (Startimer?  Alpiner?  They all look a bit like what would show up if you googled a generic three hander). I find the new Alpina Alpiner Extremes kinda cool (if reminiscent of a hundred other integrated bracelet sports watches) but they really gotta spend some design dollars on refining that bracelet.  Very pokey.

All very appropriate.  Nothing that gets me hot and bothered.

Until they did that crazy 28 unit run of Alpina Heritage Carrees with the 100 year old New Old Stock mechanical movements.  That got my attention.

I don't have a particular affinity for the Art Deco age of design though I did work on an Art Deco skyscraper for a summer in my early 20s.  And so, despite my Art History 101 section on Architecture many of these design cues are lost on me. 

However, the stepped case is lovely and the silver dial in particular has an elegance to the layout that I think the black one lacks.

That size though.  I think it had a lug to lug of 45mm+ and a very big lug width....on a rectangular dress watch, it looked quite big.  

Still very cool seeing it.