Don't miss the next drop
The caseback on this Aquastar tells you exactly what kind of watch you are looking at before you ever flip it dial-side up. AUTOMATIC. STAINLESS STEEL BACK. 100% WATERPROOF. INCABLOC. ANTIMAGNETIC. SWISS MADE. Inside the serrated medallion, the Aquastar star sits above the cursive script, the serial number 261856, and the reference 1701. No nicknames, no slogans, no marketing. Just the working credentials of a 200-meter skin diver from the moment Aquastar was still answering only to professional divers. In our opinion, that caseback is one of the cleanest mission statements in vintage Swiss dive watch design, and it is the right place to begin with the Aquastar 1701 Skin Diver.
Aquastar was founded in Geneva in 1962 by Frédéric Robert, who took over the JeanRichard name from his father and renamed the firm to reflect the only thing he cared about producing, which was professional grade instruments for divers and sailors. The early Aquastar catalog was distributed not through traditional jewelers but through Scubapro and Aqualung dive shops, which is the reason the brand stayed almost completely off the radar of the mainstream collector world while the same watches were strapped to the wrists of working divers across two oceans. The 1701 sits in that earliest professional era, before the brand was sold to the Eren Group in 1975 and the catalog began to drift toward broader sport-watch territory.
The movement inside is the A. Schild AS 1700/01, a seventeen-jewel automatic running at 18,000 beats per hour with roughly forty-one hours of power reserve. Aquastar was not a manufacture in the strict sense and never claimed to be, and the choice to outsource the caliber to A. Schild was the same pragmatic call that put proven, easily serviceable ebauches inside dozens of professional dive watches of the period. The rotor here is signed in gilt cursive, “Aquastar Genève,” which is the brand’s signature touch and the bit you actually want to see when the back comes off. The architecture is workmanlike, the Incabloc shock setting is intact at the balance, and the whole assembly is exactly what a working diver would have wanted underneath a 200-meter case in the late 1960s.
The case is a cushion-form stainless steel housing with angular lugs that flare outward into the strap line in a single sculpted gesture, the kind of monobloc-leaning silhouette that reads instantly as late-1960s and early-1970s dive watch design language. The internal rotating bezel is operated through a second crown function and carries a clean black scale with hash marks, dot indices, and elapsed-time numerals at every ten minutes, with a white triangle anchoring the twelve position. Sealing the timing bezel under the crystal rather than around it is exactly the kind of professional-grade detail the brand was patenting in this era, and it is one of the reasons these watches actually held up to real underwater service. The case sides show the honest, polished-down wear of a tool that earned its keep.
The dial is where this particular 1701 tells its own story. Whatever the original factory color was, and we suspect a dark dial given the surviving signature ink, the surface has fully transformed into a mottled silver-grey field with darker amber zones bleeding through in the center. The applied steel baton markers at twelve, three, six, and nine retain their lume slots, now oxidized to deep brown, with small round dot markers at the remaining hour positions. The Aquastar cursive sits at the top, the star logo holds the lower half, and the AUTOMATIC and depth-rating text remain readable through the patina like print pulled up from underneath. The sword hands carry the same darkened lume fill. The date window at three reads cleanly. We will be the first to say this is not a quiet, evenly-aged dial; this is a dial that took weather, and the photographs are the honest record.
We have left the watch on a black tropic-style rubber strap fitted to the 19mm lug width stamped into the case, which is, to us, the only correct strap for a professional skin diver of this generation. The textured perforated pattern and supple rubber compound are exactly what was wrapping divers’ wrists out of Scubapro storefronts when this 1701 left Geneva, and the strap sizes cleanly across a normal wrist range.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty. For the collector who would rather own an Aquastar 1701 Skin Diver that actually went underwater than a glass-case example with a refinished dial and a cleaned-up caseback, this one is, to us, exactly the right kind of survivor.
