Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean - Orange Bezel - Caliber 8500 - Full Set - Circa 2016

Deep under the oil rigs and pipelines of the North Sea, a diver can finish a shift and still be days from the surface. Coming back up takes as long whether the diver has been down for one day or thirty, so the divers stay. They live for weeks at a time in a pressurized steel chamber on the deck of a ship, breathing a gas mix that is mostly helium, which makes their voices high and thin. They ride down to the work in a diving bell and come back up to the chamber, and they do not see surface pressure until the job is over. The trade calls it saturation diving. Over those weeks the helium works its way past the gaskets of everything they carry, including their watches, and in the early years, when the pressure finally came off, the gas trapped inside expanded and blew the crystals right off the cases.

Omega went to work on the problem with the divers at COMEX, the French commercial diving company, and built them a case with no removable back, one less place for helium to get in. It was tested on their jobs in the Mediterranean and the North Sea. Rolex had taken the other route in 1967, a one-way valve in the case, and when Omega introduced the Planet Ocean in 2005, rated to six hundred meters, it gave the watch a valve of its own at ten o'clock. It is the small crown marked He on the left side of the case.

Omega offered the Planet Ocean with either a black bezel or an orange one from the beginning. When the second generation arrived in 2011 the black bezel moved to ceramic, but the orange one stayed in anodized aluminum. It is matte and deep, with black numerals at every ten minutes and a lume dot inside the triangle at zero. The dial is matte black with orange numerals at 12, 9 and 6, the Seamaster script in red, and an orange tip on the seconds hand. The broad arrow hands are filled with white lume, and the date window sits at three o'clock.

The caseback is sapphire, which was a first on a Planet Ocean, and through it the rotor turns with OMEGA CO-AXIAL 8500 printed across it in red over Omega's Geneva waves in arabesque. The escapement beneath it was designed by George Daniels, an English watchmaker who built his watches by hand on the Isle of Man. He only built twenty-five watches in his lifetime which took him around two and a half thousand hours to produce each. He drew the co-axial escapement in 1974 and patented it in 1980, and then spent years taking it around Switzerland. Patek Philippe went as far as asking him to fit it to a steel Nautilus in 1981. Omega bought the rights in the 1990s and first used the escapement in 1999, inside a movement it already made. In 2007 it built a new movement around that same escapement from the ground up, the caliber 8500. All two hundred and two of its parts were made in-house.

The watch comes as a full set. It includes the red leather presentation box and its white outer box, the warranty and pictogram cards in their leather wallet, the instruction booklet, and an Omega NATO strap in blue with an orange stripe, signed on both the buckle and the keeper. The boxes show some wear from use and storage. There are light scratches from wear on the case and bracelet. The brushed surfaces and sharp edges are intact, the bezel insert shows only a couple small marks, the sapphire crystal is clean and clear. The watch runs and keeps excellent time, the date changes, and its service history is unknown. Two links were removed from the bracelet at some point to fit a wrist, and they are included in two separate bags.

Terms: Please review all photos carefully as they are a part of the listing. Accuracy, power reserve, and water resistance are not guaranteed. Watches may require periodic service. Performance can vary with wear, temperature, and position.

All sales final.