Years of SCUBA diving with mechanical watches on my wrist have revealed certain strengths and weaknesses in functional design that would otherwise remain hidden on terra firma. I’ve also learned that my aesthetic assessment of a dive watch often changes once I’ve had the chance to dive with it. The significance – and, in turn, the satisfaction – of specific design details can shift considerably at depth.

After spending a few weeks with the Tudor Pelagos FXD, including a week SCUBA diving with it off the rustic Dutch island of Bonaire in the West Caribbean, my attitude shifted from a watch nerd’s middling curiosity to a diver’s full-blown fandom. My perspective transitioned in stages as I came to better appreciate the FXD’s aesthetic, experience its functional design, and, finally, maximize its unique capabilities as an underwater navigational tool.

Jack Forster summed up my initial reaction to the Pelagos FXD in his Second Look. Like Jack, I found the concept of the watch vaguely interesting until I strapped it on and found myself entirely enthralled. This was long before I got anywhere near water with it.

What I didn’t know about the FXD prior to handling it was how different it actually was from other dive watches, including the standard Pelagos. I didn’t expect the various design tweaks of the FXD to form such a novel and cohesive aesthetic.

The FXD is exceptionally light, due to the monobloc satin-brushed titanium case and lack of bracelet, and surprisingly sleek for a 42mm watch (just 12.75mm tall). For this reason, the FXD offers a totally unique tactile experience for a mechanical dive watch, one akin to lifting a piece of ultra-light camping equipment or a carbon fiber bicycle. Wearing the FXD feels the opposite of strapping on, say, a hefty Rolex Submariner with a solid-link bracelet.

As a mechanical watch, the FXD doesn’t exactly feel futuristic or high-tech on the wrist, but it does feel cutting-edge – like a serious, purposeful, and relevant mechanical tool.

The FXD immediately ranked among the most legible dive watches I’ve used, which further heightened its sense of purpose. The “Snowflake”-style hands, square hour markers, and rich shade of blue echo the appearance of Tudor’s original Submariner ref. 9401/0 “MN,” a mil-spec watch that was issued to the French Marine Nationale’s elite dive unit starting in 1969. Yet, despite its ancestry, nothing about the FXD looks especially vintage once it’s strapped on and ready for use.

The fabric velcro strap slotted through the fixed titanium strap bars feels ready for action (there’s also a rubber strap option that I didn’t use for this story). A fabric strap with Velcro may sound bland, but this lovely dark blue unit is produced by a renowned French ribbon maker named Julien Faure. It’s both supple and hard-wearing, an all too rare combination. Velcro enables instant adjustment over a wetsuit and is absolutely the easiest mechanism to adjust on the fly while diving. It dried in less than 15 minutes after our dives.

The fixed strap bars on the FXD derive from older military designs meant for hard abuse in combat scenarios. I never beat up a watch as much as when I’m SCUBA diving, especially before and after dives while moving air tanks in and out of trucks or climbing metal ladders onto boats in the rolling seas. Spring bars really never seem sturdy enough, and the confidence that the FXD’s fixed strap bars inspired was a revelation to me.

Adding it up, the FXD inspires heaps of what I seek in dive watches: a sense of purpose and adventure. None of this inspiration, however, arose until I experienced the FXD first-hand. Due to its many unique design details that express themselves through tactile interaction, I submit that the FXD needs to be handled to be fully appreciated.

It’s become something of a cliché in dive watch stories to mention that mechanical watches have been superfluous since dive computers became the norm, decades ago. Watch lovers dive with mechanical watches because it’s fun, because it’s retro-chic, because we love iconic 20th-century tools, and so on. We openly admit the superfluity of diving with mechanical watches.

A dive computer, however, is no good at what the FXD does so well, which is timing compass-guided swims, one after the other, as divers carry out stealth missions – often at night. For this reason alone, the FXD isn’t superfluous at all. It’s a rare mechanical tool that actually outperforms any digital option.

Standard dive watch bezels count up so that one can budget air consumption, and they turn counterclockwise only in order to prevent any accidental addition of time. The standard Tudor Pelagos operates in this way.

Unlike the standard Pelagos, however, the FXD uses a countdown bezel that can turn in both directions. Additionally, the designers have extended the bezel’s knurling beyond the case for additional grip. These choices make the FXD ideal for setting and resetting the bezel repeatedly while timing legs of a swim during a mission. You align the desired time interval with the minute hand and immediately follow the compass heading until the minute hand hits the pip; then you set the next time interval on the bezel and follow the next compass heading, and so on.

Anyone who has ever adjusted a unidirectional bezel a little too far knows what a hassle it can be to turn it all the way around again in order to hit your mark. While not an issue if you’re, say, timing eggs in the morning, it can be a serious problem in a potential life-and-death combat situation. It’s why pilots’ watches also use bi-directional bezels. These are navigational tools that need to be set quickly in the middle of missions, often while wearing gloves in disorienting environments.

While a unidirectional bezel is less than ideal for navigating a mission, most dive computers would be far worse. Typically, dive computers include stopwatches that count up, which would require the diver to remember the length of each swim. Any additional use of short-term memory and/or an external list of directions in combat situations is a no-go for military functional design.

And even if a dive computer had a countdown function, setting a digital stopwatch involves engaging multiple buttons or pushers to access and activate it from within an often-confusing menu system. If you’ve ever tinkered with a digital watch with a timer, you know what I mean. Finally, most dive computers (including mine) won’t show you vital information at the same time the stopwatch function is engaged. While a contemporary dive computer with a large illuminated TFT screen (similar to a smartphone) might display all this information at once, such a screen could reveal a combat swimmer’s location.

But legibility is still key here. Tudor has entirely redesigned the dial of the original Pelagos, omitting the date and the three-dimensional rehaut. The FXD’s dial is flat and closer to the crystal, so shadows and other potential visual clutter are reduced. These changes may seem insignificant on land, but when you’re 100 feet (30 meters) below the surface, it’s clear that the FXD’s designers successfully optimized legibility.

Taken together, these details ensure that the FXD isn’t ornamental, or superfluous. It’s a tool, not a token. The FXD is a useful addition to a diver’s gear kit, especially in diving situations that require low visibility navigation.

My partner Shelley and I SCUBA dive together quite often, and we’ve developed a solid form of communication through standard divers’ hand signals, plus a few we’ve made up ourselves. We’ve also done some tricky navigation as a pair in low visibility, where our visual signals were less effective. The Tudor Pelagos FXD could have helped us out in those demanding conditions.

In October 2020, the two of us spent two days plotting the boundaries around invasive plant outbreaks in the frigid and murky waters of Lake George, a famous freshwater body in New York State. We never went deeper than a few meters, so tracking our bottom time was meaningless as we didn’t require decompression stops. Our dive computers didn’t tell us anything we needed to know, so we didn’t even wear them.

Because our visibility was a little more than arm’s length, Shelley navigated for us using her compass as I identified outbreaks of the invasive plants. But we lacked an effective countdown instrument like the FXD to time our swims for more precise navigation to specific points on charts that the Lake George Park Commission had us tracking. We got it done by surfacing and noting land references, but it was a time-consuming and somewhat inaccurate solution.

Now that we’ve tested the underwater navigation capabilities of the Pelagos FXD in the Caribbean, it’s clear that a countdown bezel like the FXD would have allowed us to more accurately hit and make note of specific locations in Lake George.

When we tested the FXD in Bonaire’s clear waters, Shelley navigated in the fashion that all divers learn during their certification classes, with one diver operating both compass and watch. With good visibility and no life-or-death mission to complete, I was able to watch and photograph Shelley in action.

Shelley’s air/depth gauge system has a built-in compass; she held that in her right hand and folded her left arm with the FXD in front of her so that the two instruments were aligned. It was instructive to watch Shelley perform this navigation so easily as if she’d been doing it for years. This points to the exceptional functional design of the FXD, which, in Shelley’s words, was “a watch I could see actually using a lot.”

My only critique derived from using the FXD is that I’d maybe prefer to have numerals at all of “the fives” on the bezel. I found that setting the bezel near, say, the 5 or 15 hash marks required me to shift my gaze to the surrounding numerals and sort it out, adding an extra bit of cognitive work that could be designed out of the bezel, in my opinion. Shelley didn’t share this complaint, and otherwise we were entirely impressed with the FXD at depth.

It is part of our postmodern condition to be surrounded by functional objects that have been reduced to mere symbols: The inoperative rotary phone at a hipster hotel; the library full of vintage books arranged by color that no one reads; or the wooden snowshoes hung above a non-functioning potbelly stove.

When it comes to mechanical dive watches, we know their function is largely symbolic. And yet we obsess over specifications, precision, and design as if these things still mattered, furthering the ironic absurdity of our interest in tool watches. These aren’t novel ideas. Most watch enthusiasts are aware of and embrace this part of our relationship with tool watches.

The Tudor FXD, however, is the rare example of a mechanical watch with roots in the 20th century that manages to leap out of the postmodern condition and assert itself as a relevant tool for today. I experienced the FXD rather straightforwardly, just as one might have experienced any dive watch back in the mid-20th century. In this way, living with the Tudor FXD  for a few weeks was a lovely experience full of pleasant surprises and unexpected nostalgia.

All images by author unless noted.