Yeah I was actually pleasantly surprised - thing looks great. My wife hates it but she's stuck with me so that's her problem

I'm gonna wear it with my Carhartt so until you get close you think I love to fish and drive a truck. Surprise I'm a loser

I bought the fuckin hat too

And that is the brief story of how Rolex and Omega fought to strap titanium bricks on the outside of deep-sea submersibles in order to sell watches to people who will never take them in the water. The Deepsea Challenge's MSRP is $26,000, while the Ultra Deep is only a reasonable $12,000.

Rolex, unsurprisingly, took this personally. However, without deeper places to go with a watch on a sub, Rolex instead made an 11,000-meter rated watch a consumer model. It's....wearable. Omega's consumer edition of the Ultra Deep is only rated to 6,000 meters, so as not to look horrific. The Rolex:

Funnily enough, due to an accident, one of the watches was actually left on the bottom for more than two days. It survived, in perfect condition and keeping good time. They had to send the Limiting Factor back down to get it (well, the lander it was attached to, which was presumably expensive).

Yes, the Limiting Factor is also wearing a watch. Another monstrosity. The Omega Ultra Deep is literally made from the cutoff pieces of the hull of the Limiting Factor. While theoretically not as waterproof as the Deepsea Challenge, the Ultra Deep went to.... 10,928 meters. More than the Rolex!

Omega has set many historical records throughout the years. But they wanted this one. Smash cut to 2019, when Omega's insane plans were revealed, strapped to the DSV "Limiting Factor." The Limiting Factor is now owned by Steam guy Gabe Newell, for insane, inscrutable reasons not worth discussing.

This was certainly not Omega's first dive watch. Omega produced the Seamaster, the Plongeur Professional (developed with Jacques-Yves Cousteau), and a host of other dive watches alongside many other brands like Blancpain (with its classic Fifty Fathoms).

The watch was a nigh-unwearable orb of titanium and sapphire, supposedly watertight to 12,000 meters. That's 13.6 tons of pressure exerted on the watch. Why, you may ask, would someone need such a watch? Omega did not ask. Instead, they made a watch that could go a little deeper than Rolex's orb.

On March 26, 2012, James Cameron piloted the DSV Deepsea Challenger 10,898 meters underwater to the floor of the Mariana Trench. Strapped to the robotic arm of the Deepsea Challenger was a unique Rolex called the Deepsea Challenge. Yes, the sub is wearing a watch.

Fast forward to today - dive watches are not only commonly worn, but also capable of far more than their predecessors. Enter the Rolex Deepsea Challenge and the fight between Omega and Rolex to repeatedly, cartoonishly one-up each other.

In 1960, Rolex strapped something called the Deep Sea Special to the outside of the Bathyscaphe Trieste, which descended to 10,908 meters. Miraculously, the watch survived. It was very ugly and probably should have remained at the bottom of the ocean.

Today, often worn by people who have never gotten in anything deeper than a pool, dive watches like the subsequent Rolex Submariner (first introduced in 1954) were not for fashion, and would have been EXTREMELY gauche to wear with a suit. Like wearing a dive computer to a nice dinner.

But this was not truly a dive watch - and the first "dive watch" would arguably be the Omega Marine. Brands had been forced by the Oyster patent to "design around" the Oyster case. And thus, the dive watch was born.

In 1926, Rolex patented the "Oyster" case (my interests intersect!), which provided for a screw-down caseback and a screw-down crown (the twisty thing on the side of a watch that adjusts the hands, for the uninitiated).

The creation of the original dive watch is an interesting history. There are those who will dispute who originally created the first "dive watch" - that is, the first watch designed to be pressure-resistant and water-resistant enough to be worn truly "underwater," rather than while swimming.

with mahk wahlberg aboahd, tha implosion would have been fahkin' stahped for shah.