A date with the deep – the Blancpain Bathyscaphe Quantième Complet Phase de Lune
Editor’s note: Dive watches tend to be simple affairs, but not always. Justin embraces complexity (and calendars) in his review of the Blancpain Bathyscaphe Quantième Complet Phase de Lune. Read on … The story in a second: A classy calendar for the life aquatic. Expanding on a dive watch collection — especially one with such a rich history as the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms — is a challenge at the best of times. Do you stick to classic tool watch roots? Do you step outside the box with a complication or design with more commercial appeal? Do you start toying with unorthodox case materials? There are a lot of ways to go here, and as we’ve seen year after year, the results can be fantastic, just as easily as they can be questionable. We’ve seen Blancpain take some interesting approaches with the Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe collection recently, including the blue ceramic-cased flyback chronograph Ocean Commitment II, but for 2018 we were presented with a couple of very unexpected dive watches from the longstanding brand. The most curious is the complete calendar moonphase (Quantième Complet Phase de Lune, per the brand), taking the classic 43mm satin-brushed Bathyscaphe case, and fitting it with…
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It’s long been a staple of watch collecting advice and lore — don’t keep your watches in your sock drawer or consumer-grade safe, keep them in a safe deposit box. Well, that old adage is looking a little stretched on the basis of a recent article in The New York Times, which recounts the harrowing tale of a watch collector who rocked up to his bank one day to discover his collection of watches gone. And it wasn’t the result of a daring heist, instead the much more banal human error. Even worse, he had precious little legal recourse or protection. An excellent look at one of the most romanticised, and least profitable aspects of banking … Well worth a read. 
Next up in our rolling cavalcade of ‘Every Watch Tells a Story’ stories is Vince. Now, this one is a bit of a funny one, and not just because the watch in question is the critically acclaimed Joker from Russian watchmaker Konstantin Chaykin. If you’re not familiar with the Joker, it’s a very clever piece of watchmaking, that looks like, well, a Joker. Look closer and you’ll notice that those crazy eyes show hours and minutes, and the lolling red tongue is actually a moonphase. It’s bright, cheery and pretty out of the box for a generally conservative industry. And these are all reasons why Vince fell for the watch, hard. The only problem? It was limited to 99 pieces and they were all gone. He actually made a secret edition with a casino in Russia called Tigre de Cristal So Vince put some calls in to try to track one down. Within minutes he had a call back … but there was something odd about this Joker …