Of all the new releases at Watches and Wonders, the international watch trade show in Geneva that took place earlier this year, it was the hardest one to miss. The name alone was huge: best Canada replica TAG Heuer Aquaracer Professional 1000 Superdiver watches. A big name for a big 45mm-diameter watch, it boasts a dodecagonal black-and-orange bezel, a chunky bracelet, a garage-door-size helium escape valve, and a brilliant arrowhead hour hand loaded with enough lume to read Proust in the dark – even at 1,000 metres underwater. With a large brutalist crown guard and a relatively slim – by deep-dive perfect fake watches standards – 15.75mm thickness, the message is clear: TAG Heuer is back in the extreme dive watch market.
The Superdiver is a project close to TAG CEO Frédéric Arnault’s heart, albeit one born out of frustration. A keen skier, golfer, chess master, and tennis player, Arnault is also an experienced diver. “When I joined [TAG], I was approached to sponsor someone wanting to go deep diving,” he says. “I thought, Okay, that’s cool and it’s in line with our Don’t Crack Under Pressure slogan. But if we do something like that, we need 1:1 AAA replica watches that goes deep. And we didn’t have that.”
Now cheap TAG Heuer copy watches does. The Super-diver is just the latest in the company’s long history of pushing the limits of ultra-deep-dive watches. And this iteration merely returns the Swiss watchmaker to where it was in 1982 when the 1,000-metre Diver debuted. Back then, one kilometre underwater was extraordinary, putting it within reach but still 220 metres short of the most emblematic of extreme dive watches: the top replica Rolex Sea-Dweller watches.
By the time the Swiss made super clone Rolex Sea-Dweller watches launched in 1967, Rolex had already been deep diving for a decade and a half. In 1953, off the southwestern coast of Italy, an experimental Rolex plunged to a depth of more than three kilometres fixed to the outside of a submersible. The achievement was eclipsed in 1960 when the same vessel descended 10,916 metres to the bottom of the Challenger Deep (the deepest known point of the earth’s seabed) in the Pacific’s Mariana Trench with another experimental Rolex attached to its hull. Even though the watch was equipped with a crystal resembling a transparent Ping-Pong ball that made it impractical for everyday wear, the feat captured the world’s imagination. When offshore oil exploration hit its stride in the 1960s, the Sea-Dweller became the default timepiece of the underwater elite.
In 2008, the appropriately named Rolex Deepsea sparked a new era for the deep-dive replica watches for sale by functioning at depths of 3,900 metres. Three years later, Hublot launched a 4,000-metre watch (the King Power Diver), only for Rolex to up – or, more accurately, lower – the ante in 2012 with a specially engineered Rolex Deepsea Challenge attached to a submersible with Titanic director James Cameron aboard.
Then, in 2019, Omega claimed a record depth of 10,935 metres when three prototypes of its high quality fake Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean Ultra Deep watches were attached to Limiting Factor, the submersible owned by Texas businessman Victor Vescovo. Those extra 19 metres gave Omega a chance to challenge Rolex for bragging rights and provided a backstory for its biggest launch so far this year (MoonSwatch aside), the Seamaster Planet Ocean Ultra Deep, a watch with a dive depth of 6,000 metres.
Of course, 6,000 metres is overkill. The Professional Association of Diving Instructors defines deep dives as beyond 18 metres – and even adventurous recreational divers limit themselves to 40 metres. The record for the deepest dive (701 metres), achieved by Rolex advertising star Théo Mavrostomos, has stood for 30 years, yet the deep-dive luxury Swiss replica watches has never been more popular. Breitling – primarily associated with aviation – has a 2,000-metre watch, while Zelos (an obscure but accessibly priced brand) successfully crowdfunded the Abyss, the third iteration of which has a depth of 3,000 metres and retails at £550.
It raises the question: what is a watchmaker to do, now that it’s getting increasingly tricky to stand out in this field? The only answer, it seems, is to go deeper.