Vintage US Navy SEALAB Videos Worth Watching... Vintage Dive Watch Content.

A common overlap in the world of collecting is a fondness for vintage diving watches and a fondness for the era of diving when those watches were essential tools and not the fashion accessories for the cafe going, craft beer sipping collectors which they have unfortunately become.  We're talking about the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms, its military cousin the Tornek-Rayville, the Rolex Submariner, and eventually, the Rolex Sea-Dweller.  In few cases were these watches more essential than in operation with the world's navies.  

In military use, these watches saw a level of day in, day out ass kicking which is difficult to fully comprehend and their continued operation as diving tools is evidence of the extreme build quality of the watches.  The US Navy's SEALAB experiments, part of the Man-in-the-Sea program, which lasted from 1964 till their tragic end in 1969, proved the legitimacy of deep water saturation diving.  Of course, all of that diving required some high quality time pieces which make these SEALAB pictures and videos all the more awesome.

The Navy looks to have done all of their own recording and production on these classic, very vintage looking videos and the watch spotting is second to none.  I'll throw in some awesome photos after the videos.  Thanks for reading.

Here are the US Navy documentaries for SEALAB I, II, and III.

And here are some photos which I think are ridiculously cool.  Not the use of the Submarine along with a wrist mounted compass by almost every diver.  

Robert Barth, now retired USN Bos'n, wearing a Rolex Submariner.  If you don't know who this guy is, you're blowing it.  

USN Commander Malcolm Scott Carpenter (1925-2013) was an Mercury astronaut as well as a SEALAB aquanaut having been involved in both SEALAB II and III.  During SEALAB II, Carpenter spent 30 days in the undersea habitat before decompressing and surfacing.  He also sports the venerable Rolex Submariner.  

They came up with pretty cool uniforms for SEALAB.  The issue watches weren't too bad either.  

Very few have dived harder or longer than these guys.  It's a shame that the SEALAB program was almost completely overshadowed by NASA's space exploration as it was in many ways equally dangerous and ground (water?) breaking.