Military occupations don’t come much more serious than being a Royal Navy Clearance Diver. At first glance, this electric blue wave dial Seamaster 300 appears like any other . . .that is, until you flip it over. There, you will be greeted by the unit’s crest under sapphire and numbered in series limited edition of 150 watches. This run was made available to purchase only to active (in 2009) Mine Clearance Divers. This is a Seamaster 300 which served its country and wears it proudly.
If you visit the Royal Navy’s website, you’ll see Clearance Diving rated as a ‘high demand role’. This is classic British understatement. These frogmen are part diving god, part bomb disposal master, and play crucial roles in other maritime counter-terror operations. Often, it requires three years service in other roles before a frogman may be eligible to try out to be a Clearance Diver. Due to the high demands of the role, there are roughly only 100 operational Clearance Divers in the Royal Navy at any given time.
Omega, and indeed Rolex, have a history of very quietly making extremely small production runs for elite British military units. Most commonly, we’ve seen SAS Planet Ocean 2500s or RAF aviator’s Speedmaster X-33s. Interestingly, this Seamaster 300 was the first time one of these runs ever received its own reference number. There are very few divers with comparable story or history that aren’t going for large sums at big-3 auction houses. This Seamaster 300 may just be some of the deepest value in diving watches out there today. Besides, if Bond were a real person alive in the Casino Royal years, this is the sort of thing he'd actually be wearing.
