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Everybody’s got a “grail” watch.
I’m a pro, so I’ve got two. The first one is Patek Philippe’s first waterproof chronograph, the ref. 1463, produced between the 1940s and 1960s. These start at about $150,000 and climb from there, which is a lotta moolah for a watch. The second is the Abercrombie & Fitch Seafarer, which Heuer made for the then-outdoorsman brand between the 1940s and 1970s. I especially like the earlier references 346 and 2443. Starting around $25,000, these don’t come cheap either. But it’s at least possible that I’ll be dumb and/or drunk enough to make this kind of financial mistake one day. (After all, this is why I don’t have children.)
Now, it seems that there is a way for me to save $13,000 and still walk away with one of my grails. How? The watch blog Hodinkee and TAG Heuer just teamed up on a reissue of the famed Seafarer, and are issuing it in a run of 968 pieces—125 for the Hodinkee Shop, with the remaining 843 pieces for TAG to sell through its boutiques and retailers. Based upon the later ref. 2446C executions of Heuer’s Autavia, it uses that model’s color scheme and houses the watch in TAG Heuer’s modern Carrera Glassbox, upsizing it slightly to 42mm. At $7,950, it ain’t exactly cheap, but it’s considerably more affordable than a vintage version. Most importantly, it gives folks like me access to a watch that hasn’t been produced in over 50 years. It’s available on Hodinkee right now.
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The list of qualities I love about this watch is nearly endless. The Seafarer is purpose-built to solve a moderately obscure problem, it’s unusually colorful for a mid-century sports watch, and well proportioned in nearly all its many iterations. The thing about the Seafarer that gets me every time is that it so vividly conjures feelings of summertime for me. The hunting/fishing complication tied to the tides and the yacht timer function take me back to the late ’90s and early 2000s when I was but a wee lad in summer camp sailing on Plunkett Reservoir in the Berkshires with my fellow brats, or hiking in the ’Gunks north of New York City with my family, or even rifling through Long Beach Island’s antique stores with my ma. Everything about the Seafarer is sunny, which is why I’m delighted to see it resurfaced.
But let’s back up a second—a brief history lesson is in order to understand why this watch is so special. Betcha thought Abercrombie & Fitch was just an overhyped mall brand full of chest-thumping young models and pricey, colorful T-shirts? Well, you’re not wrong, but before it turned into that, it was one of America’s foremost outdoor retailers—the type of place where Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway would shop for fishing and hunting gear. (The company’s flagship store in Manhattan housed 12 floors of such gear and included an angler’s pool and an in-house watchmaker.) Walter Haynes, then-president of A&F, would visit Heuer twice a year to pick out new model’s for the brand’s watch counter.
