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. This time, we’re off the coast of Bonaire in the Caribbean with the Doxa’s professional SUB line.
The downside of direct-to-consumer sales is that we don’t get to try things on before buying, and with watches this is especially frustrating, because fit is such a personal matter. This conundrum has plagued fans of Doxa watches since the company revived itself in 2002 and started re-issuing some of the funkiest function-driven dive watches ever conceived. Thankfully, I was finally able to get Doxa’s three primary models together and bring them SCUBA diving in Bonaire, a Dutch island in the West Caribbean. This comparison shed a lot of light on the fit, finish, and overall vibe of the quintessential Doxa divers: the SUB 300, SUB 1200T and SUB 1500T.
In 1967, Doxa was the fist company to design and build a dive watch from the ground up. Blancpain and then Rolex offered dive watches in the mid 1950s, and the world followed suit, but those early dive watches were adaptations of pre-existing watches. The Doxa Sub 300 of 1967, however, was a radically forward-thinking, technology-laden beast of a dive watch that Jacques Cousteau adopted into his Aqualung product line as soon as it came out. Why all the fuss?
Doxa helped Rolex develop the first helium escape valve, a clever device that lets accumulated helium out of the watch case when ascending from deep, long dives. Without it, professional saturation divers would see their watches pop a crystal during the decompression process.
Doxa was also the first to put the US Navy’s no-decompression (no-deco) scale on the bezel. This now-patented feature gives a diver an instant reference of how long they can dive at any given depth without making a decompression stop. This was critical stuff in the era before the dive computer, and it was boldly apparent to me when diving that the mechanical Doxas are as much data-spewing computers as they are merely watches.
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Lastly, Cousteau’s fuss certainly included the fact that Doxa dive watches look so damn cool. After all, Cousteau was an Academy Award-winning filmmaker and one heck of a wardrobe man (red beanies anyone?). I’ve often likened wearing a Doxa to eating oysters: they’re both totally bizarre, even repulsive, propositions, but most who give it a try become hooked for reasons that are hard to explain to the uninitiated. As such, Doxa has a cult following, of which I am a devout member. I’m aim to indoctrinate you.
