From Eska Amphibian 600 to 250. “Legends Never Die”
in collab with Francisco Fernandez
Let’s talk about grail watches, and more precisely about grail diving watches. Almost everybody knows their classics: the Jaeger-Lecoultre Polaris, the Deep-Sea Alarm from the same brand, the old Panerais, the Doxa T-Graph, the various Omega Seamasters (300, Ploprof…) the Aquastar Deepstar, the “French squad” - ZRC, Triton Spirotechnique - some double crown super compressors - Longines, Vetta - and a few other splendid pieces. But maybe two watches stand out: the Rolex Submariner, some will add “big crown” or “Bond” to that name, and I would say tied at first position with the Rolex, a diver with a very different look, the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms. These two can be considered the nec plus ultra in terms of historically important diver collecting.
A lesser number of watch nerds might have come across an obscure watch ticking all the boxes of its Blancpain cousin: the Eska Amphibian 600. A breathtaking radium diver with a huge bakelite bezel, big squared numbers on the dial, and the icing on the cake: a very peculiar power reserve at 12 o’clock. We can call the Eska Amphibian a unicorn because of its scarce availability. In fact, if you make a research, you will only find pics of 10 existing exemplars, which makes me think that only a bunch were produced probably, maybe less than 100, otherwise a bit more would have surfaced. Of course, they were tool watches, so the ones that got ruined by water leaks were put in a drawer, maybe forgotten for some time and simply thrown away.
Eska was a Swiss brand founded in 1918 with a nice success over the years, where it reached the American market too, because the sons of the founder moved to the USA. Apart from some beautiful early chronographs and enamel cloisonné dial watches, I would say that the Amphibian 600 represents the peak of the brand, at the end of the 1950’s, which happens to be the golden age, the birth of the “tough” sport watches. Then Eska had to shut down after the quartz crisis, in 1987.
Today, Christophe Chevreton and Sinicha Knezevich took over the brand name to realize their first watch, the Eska Amphibian 250, inspired on the Amphibian 600. Curiously enough, the founder of Eska, Sylvain Kocher, named his company after his initials, the same as Sinisa Knezevich.
The Amphibian 250 is 40mm wide without crown (original was 38mm), 46mm lug-to-lug, 13,5mm thick case. It has a double-domed sapphire glass, countdown rotating bezel, screw-down crown, and a water resistance rated at 250m. (The old sister was 600 feet waterproof) At first glance, the 250 is a faithful recreation of the 600. We notice the different second hand, a lollipop with a red top end is adopted here, and the lack of the power reserve function on the sandwich dial. This dial feature and the small red batons over the minute indexes are a novelty in the modern watch. The colour of the luminescent material on both dial and bezel has a nice warm tone giving this new Amphibian a great vintage feeling. The watch is powered by a Seiko NH38 movement, 24 jewels, 21,600vph, 41 hours power reserve, hacking seconds. It will come with 3 different straps (2 piece black NATO, a sand-coloured canvas and a black tropic)
The first 300 pieces will bear an individual number on the caseback. The sales have begun on Kickstarter on January 24, and will last 1 month until February 24, 2024. After 24 hours only, the brand has succeeded in selling the first 300 pieces which means green light to production. The Eska Amphibian 250 will be sold at 740 euros on Kickstarter (final retail price: 1,050 euros) and deliveries are expected to start in June this year. You can find more information on the official website https://www.legends-never-die.fr/