A Series IIA For Your Wrist…

What is it about simple, utilitarian tools that pleases the soul? Tools that make no flowery promises beyond a commitment to getting the job done? Tools that are tough, no nonsense, and reassuringly simple? The Land Rover Series is lot like this, in fact. It was built to get you from here to there, regardless of where “here” is, or “there,” and regardless of what miserable hellscape lies in between. It doesn’t promise luxury, it doesn’t promise speed, it doesn’t promise refinement. It doesn’t claim to make you look like a superhero, though it often does, and it doesn’t promise to coddle you in opulence. It merely promises to get you there. And in an increasingly flashy society where an endless stream of noisy “needs” are created for still more endless streams of products to fill them, there is something about basic, honest, hard working tools that can put a subtle smile of satisfaction on your face for years, or even decades, in a way that flashier alternatives usually don’t. A Series Land Rover. A good axe. A set of Hazet open-end wrenches. An Italian stove-top coffee pot. These things get it DONE. Year after year.

Being a petrolhead I always have a few different cars in my personal driveway. Some of them more luxurious than others, some flashier. Some faster. But although my cars come and go, I always have a Series Land Rover of some type, because in a very real way I find I can’t live happily without one. The Series Landy scratches too many of my itches and it scratches them more completely and more readily than almost any other vehicle, and despite its shortcomings, when I’m reaching for a set of keys I find myself grabbing the ones for the Land Rover more often than you’d think. As an analogue, I have more than a handful of watches. Some flashier than others, some more luxurious, some more expensive, but when I need to strap something on my wrist and go, one watch tends to jump out at me more often than you’d think.

My Vostok Amphibia.

Any watch good enough for the head of the Zissou Society is good enough for me.

There is nothing flashy about the Vostok Amphibia. Nothing fancy. Nothing luxurious. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s a chunk of relatively crudely finished Soviet-era design, utterly devoid of pretense and which cost me about eighty bucks. But it’s also a watch which has wormed its way into my heart, and the hearts of myriad other devotees around the globe, and has established itself as a cult classic - an icon of rugged simplicity - and a triumph of functionality over frivolity. Bill Murray’s character “Steve Zissou” wore an Amphibia in the movie “The Life Aquatic,” and it was a perfect fit for that quirky Wes Anderson classic. The fact that it can be replaced for less than it costs to take my family out to lunch is irrelevant, because the Amphibia can shrug off an unholy beating on sea or land, from the sandy shores of the Mediterranean to the rocky mountain peaks towering above, and it doesn’t need to be replaced. Or repaired. Or even serviced. I grab it when I’m going surfing with my kids, or hustling to the shop to pull a transmission, but it’s not the kind of watch I wouldn’t wear to a meeting, either. It’s a tool. A simple tool. It does what the best tools do. It always works. Like the Series Land Rover, it doesn’t promise things it can’t deliver and it doesn’t promise to do anything with flash or luxury. It just tells time. Always. It gets you from here to there.

The origins of the Amphibia date back to 1967 and the belly of the Soviet Union. The Soviet army needed a dive watch capable of handling high water pressures, and the typical Soviet approach to such engineering challenges (namely, buying one of the leading western examples and boldly copying it) wasn’t workable in this particular case. The Vostok watch company, you see, lacked the requisite machining capabilities to effectively rip off a Rolex Submariner or Blancpain Fifty Fathoms. They could take one apart and see what to make, but they couldn’t physically make it. So they had to come up with their own ideas.

The ideas they came up with, however, were remarkably elegant and pleasingly efficient. Rather than use the western formula of encasing the watch in an impenetrable vault of precisely machined, pressure-defying solidity, they went the opposite direction. They used an ingenious design in which a crudely machined case actually uses the increasing force of pressure to deform in a controlled way, thereby increasing water resistance as depth (and therefore pressure) increases. The caseback actually deforms into a rubber gasket under high pressure, sealing ever more tightly. The crystal (sapphire? No. Mineral glass? No. Try acrylic. Lucite. Aw, hell… it’s PLASTIC.) deforms and distorts under pressure, sealing its edges ever more tightly into the case the deeper you go. And you know what? It works! The damn thing actually works! Without expensive machining, without fancy materials, it works, all the same.

Today, more than half a century later, it’s still working. The mighty Vostok Amphibia is still going strong, now available in so many combinations of cases, dials, bezels and bracelets it’s more or less impossible to keep track. But each is powered by a simple and reliable Vostok automatic movement, designed and manufactured entirely in-house, which can be wound by hand or through the natural movements of your wrist. In all its various guises and configurations, it’s still cheap as chips and tough as nails, and it remains one of the only sub-$100 watches that actually gets proper cred from luxury watch snobs. Not that that matters, and not that you will care, but it’s a simple fact. People who don’t know the Amphibia don’t know it, but anyone who does tends to give it a smile and a well earned “attaboy” nod. As they should.

If you want an Amphibia for yourself, here are my tips: Pick out the one you want. Most people tend to favor the now-mildly-famous “Scuba Dude” dial, but mine is a reference 090662, which is a take on the 1967 cushion-case original, and features a simple, black dial adorned with little more than the “Amphibia” name, “Water Resistant 200m” and “Made in Russia,” all in Russian cyrillic script. Pick the model you want, with the dial and bezel that suits you, and order it up. When it arrives, remove the jangley, cheap, shitty-ass original bracelet and put it on a proper strap of your choosing. (Mine is a vintage-inspired “tropical” rubber strap, to which I have always been partial.) Then wind it up, strap it on, and forget it. Don’t stress about the quirks. Revel in them. Don’t expect a unidirectional bezel with pleasing, well machined clicks, because you’re going to get a bi-directional bezel that scrapes around the case like fingernails on a blackboard. Don’t freak out when you unscrew the crown and it flops around like a rag doll. It isn’t broken, it’s an Amphibia thing, and actually serves a purpose to protect the stem in case of impact. Don’t expect a “quick set” date function, because the Vostok doesn’t have one, although there is a quirky “hack” that allows you to trick the system and set the date more quickly than winding it all the way around through days and weeks. You can google it.

Most of all, though, just wear it, and enjoy your new tool. Just like the Series Land Rover, it isn’t going to wow you with luxury, and it won’t thrill you with opulence. Instead, it will satisfy you more than you might think it will, and will provoke the kind of wan smile and nod of quiet satisfaction that all the most loyal tools elicit.

Just like a good axe.