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DrStrong
[Rolex Moderator]
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The elusive Comex Double Red Sea Dweller

Sometimes patience is important for a collector….

After declining and missing Comex watches for the past ten years, my day also had to come...

So last tuesday, I took a short car trip to meet an ex Comex diver....

This gentleman entered the Comex in early 1970. He told me that the same day he was hired, he was asked to dive at -80m to show if he was "made for the job"....

In september of the same year, he participated with two other divers to the Janus II experiment: he worked during 8 days at -255m to fix a pipeline, wearing an Omega Ploprof that "never really worked well"....;-)

This experiment was a great success and demonstrated the ability of man to work at such depth.

In 1971, he became Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite for his achievements.

The same year, he was given by Comex one of the 10 Sea Dweller that had just been delivered by Rolex. The existence of these watches is only known by a handful of collectors at this point and most people think that the first Rolex delivered to Comex were the batch of 5513's sold in 1972.

The Sea Dweller in question did not leave the diver's wrist for the next 20 years: he was wearing it when diving in the North Sea, Malta, Labrador, Congo, Gabon, etc...

In the early 1990's, he stopped wearing it because he had just been offered a quartz Breitling watch. Since his house had been robbed twice, his wife decided to hide the Rolex in a teapot they never used. Then they both forgot about the watch for almost 20 years...until last week...

Luckily enough, he told a friend of mine about the lost watch that he had just found...and now the watch has a new home !

So here’s what a Comex watch looks like after having being abused for many years and worn from the frozen deep of the sea to the burning desert of Africa !

The Comex lighter came with the watch as a gift !

The watch still has its original Double Red mk2 dial (this was confirmed to me by the first and only owner before me) and the original handset. The dial has turned to a crazy brown color and the tritium indexes have such a nice patina !

I had never handled one of these early Comex DRSD's before, but I know that two other watches of the same delivery batch have already "surfaced".....so more informations to follow !

An early delivery of a handful of 1665's to Comex is not well documented but of course makes pretty much sense, as this model was developed for the company by Rolex in 1967; it would have been surprising that Comex did not ask for any SD before 1977, when the famous batch of 1665's with logo dial and 2XXX issues number was delivered. Even if all the divers did not need 610m watches, the 255m limit was already reached since 1970... hence the need of a handful of SD's in the early 1970's ! 

Acknowledgements: many thanks to Marcello Pisani for his knowledge about Comex watches !

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