Thank you Tag Heuer Replica. We all have our holy grail watch, the watch we desire more than anything and that would sit as the centerpiece of our collection. As a good professional, I have two. Number one is Patek Philippe’s first waterproof chronograph, the ref. 1463, which was produced between the 1940s and 1960s. These pieces start at $150,000 and go up, which is a lot of money to spend on a watch. The second is the Abercrombie & Fitch Seafarer, which Tag Heuer made for the brand, which at the time specialized in outdoor products, between the 1940s and 1970s. I particularly like the earlier references 346 and 2443. With a starting price of around €25,000, these models are not cheap either. But it’s at least possible that I’ll be stupid and/or drunk enough to nearly go bankrupt one day (after all, that’s why I don’t have kids).

It has a seemingly endless list of qualities. The Seafarer was designed to solve a relatively obscure problem, it comes in an unusual color for a mid-century sports watch, and it has excellent proportions in almost every version. What appealed to me, in particular, was that it smelled of summer. The tide-linked hunting/fishing complication and yacht timer function took me back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I was going to summer camp, sailing on Plunkett Reservoir with my friends, or hiking in the Gunks upstate New York with my family. The Seafarer is a little sunshine, so I’m glad to see it resurface.

In the late 1940s, Abercrombie commissioned a watch based on the nascent “Solunar” theory, a system developed by John Alden Knight that gave the outdoorsman the ideal times to hunt and fish based on the position of the sun and moon, and thus the tides. Charles-Edouard Heuer tasked his young son, Jack Heuer, at age 15, with developing a method for incorporating the solunar theory into a wristwatch. Taking the problem to Jack’s high school physics teacher, they developed a movement that displayed the changing tides on a special indicator throughout the month. The “Solunar,” as it was named, was unique but did not sell well.

The limited-edition Seafarer was the subject of much covetousness in the watch world. The model was subsequently discontinued in the 1970s, at the onset of the quartz crisis and the collapse of Abercrombie & Fitch (in its original form). But collectors have long since grasped the timepiece’s enduring appeal and stunning design, and early examples in good condition fetch tens of thousands of dollars at auction.