Doxa SUB 300 watches

The Doxa SUB 300 is the dive watch Doxa showed at Baselworld in 1967. Product manager Urs Eschle developed it with the diver Claude Wesly, and tests in Lake Neuchâtel showed that an orange dial stays legible in murky water, which is why orange became the SUB's colour. Jacques Cousteau, then chairman of U.S. Divers, was consulted during development, and the Swiss Armed Forces bought the watch for a new unit of combat divers between 1968 and 1979. The key is Doxa's patented unidirectional bezel: it pairs a dive-time scale with a depth scale, so a diver reads the no-decompression time straight off the bezel.

In 1968 Doxa followed with the SUB 300T Conquistador, among the first divers' watches sold to the public with a helium release valve. The US Navy issued SUB 300T models to the SEALAB III aquanauts. Clive Cussler's hero Dirk Pitt wears one, Matthew McConaughey wore a SUB 300T Professional as Pitt in Sahara, and Robert Redford wore a Sharkhunter in Three Days of the Condor.

Today the two names mark two different watches. The SUB 300 follows the 1967 original: a 42.5 mm steel case 13.4 mm thick, a domed sapphire crystal shaped like the original plexiglass, 300 metres of water resistance, a bezel in metres and a COSC-certified automatic movement. The SUB 300T, presented in September 2019 as a tribute to the Conquistador, keeps the 42.5 mm width but is rated to 1,200 metres, adds a helium valve and scales its bezel in feet. Both have a date and take a 20 mm strap.

Each dial colour carries a name shared across the line: Professional is orange, Sharkhunter black, Searambler silver, Divingstar yellow, and Caribbean and Aquamarine are the blues. The SUB 300 Carbon puts the same dials in a forged carbon case with a titanium inner chamber, and the Carbon Aqua Lung US Divers, a black-dial edition of 300 pieces, carries the name of the company Cousteau once chaired.