![]() ![]() Technically, it is very different from scuba diving with a compressed air tank. Saturation diving (“SAT”) was first experimented with in 1938 but took off in a big way with the growth of offshore drilling in the oil industry in the 1960s. Nigel Band’s Rolex Sea-Dweller (photo courtesy Nigel Band) Diving deeper The airport’s Rolex retailer must have been a little taken aback by the scruffy 23-year old sauntering in dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and flip-flops and asking to try on the Sea-Dwellers. He eventually bought the Sea-Dweller for £680 at Schiphol airport in 1986 on his way home from an offshore project in the Middle East. He figured he could afford the asking price, but was sternly told by his supervisor, “you’re too young for a Rolex, lad, you can get one when you’ve done your first saturation dive.”įor the time being he carried on wearing his Casio G-Shock – which was a popular choice for divers at the time, even if they had to keep a backup due to the watches’ tendency to explode on the way back to the surface – followed by a Seiko 150 Sport, a rugged quartz dive watch. 1986 Rolex Sea-Dwellerīand came to his Sea-Dweller after a colleague returned offshore looking to make a quick sale of a Rolex watch after a longer-than-planned spell of unemployment. For the first week he didn’t dare open his mouth. He did however manage to wangle an apprenticeship on an oil services barge in the Far East, and his diving career was under way.Īs a fresh-faced 18-year-old English public school (private school in the States) boy he didn’t fit the usual diver mold at all – his first colleagues were a battle-hardened crew of Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders – literally, as most of them were Vietnam veterans. The offshore life held a strong appeal for him.īand immediately applied for a diving course in Plymouth but was turned down because he was too young. And when Band’s father sat him down with his brother and sister to tell them that the family was moving to the UK, the children looked at each other in horror and burst into tears simultaneously. Once it had become clear that I probably wasn’t going to make it to university any time soon, after another heated family discussion along the lines of ‘what are we going to do with Nigel,’ as he left the room in despair my father said, ‘Well, you can always become a diver’.”įor an oilman like his father, this was tantamount to saying, “Well, you can always drive a taxi.” But even though he had no actual diving experience, it struck a chord with Band, who had always felt as much at home in the water as on dry land, if not more so.Īs a boy in Oman, he recalls heading off to the beach to go snorkeling with pals after school each day rather than playing football as most kids do. “It was actually after an off-the-cuff remark that my father made at home in London. I caught up with him for a Zoom interview last week, as is the current fashion, and he told me how he got into diving in the first place. But I’ll get to that later.Īs the son of an oil company executive, Band had an unusually peripatetic childhood, living in five countries by the age of 15, and has some rather entertaining stories to tell. The second is a 1952 Rolex Oyster Perpetual of considerable historical interest, which ventured to great altitudes. But Band’s Sea-Dweller has clocked up more than 20 years’ saturation diving to depths of 120 meters. ![]() Most dive watches only get wet in the kitchen sink or shower and come no closer to helium than balloons at a children’s birthday party. It is unusual in that it is about as far from a desk diver as you will get. He also owns two rather unusual Rolex watches: the first is a 1986 “triple-six” Rolex Sea-Dweller Reference 16660. Off to work, Rolex Sea-Dweller on wrist (photo courtesy Nigel Band) ![]()
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