Diver finds Patek Philippe Aquanaut Travel Time lost for over a year
Russell SheldrakeA Patek Philippe Aquanaut Travel Time slipped off a traveller’s wrist while he was swimming off the Spanish coast at Mallorca in the summer of 2023. Initially reported on by What’s The Jam, a hobby diver named Giorgio was tasked with finding the watch 10 metres below the waves, using nothing but a makeshift grid system and his metal detector.
Something we should point out from the start is the original article suggests that the watch found was worth £55,000, meaning that it would be the newly released Aquanaut Travel Time ref. 5164G in white gold. However, given that this watch was only released this year, and the watch we’re talking about was lost last summer – unless the man who lost the watch was a Stern testing out an early prototype, it’s far more likely that the watch that was found at the bottom of the ocean was the older 5164A in stainless steel. The retail price of this piece was a little over US$40,000, but there are versions available of Chrono24 right now for between US$75,000-US$80,000. But we will forgive What’s The Jam for this, given that it’s not a watch publication.
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It’s reported the Danish collector contacted Giorgio and his girlfriend who run a hobby diving business called Mallorca Detecting, where they set out to find lost valuables off the sunny Mallorca coast. Giorgio has devised a homemade numbered grid system constructed from plastic bottles: a necessary invention, as the spot where the watch was last seen had seagrass which measured 1.5 metres high. It took three dives, totalling 9 hours under the water, and after multiple missed calls, with scraps of metal and cans, Giorgio was finally able to recover the precious Patek.
It was covered in coral and starting to show signs of rust, but it was still in the same spot the unlucky (or I guess lucky) Danish collector had lost it. It’s possible the watch could be restored to keep running. As we’ve seen recently, luxury timepieces can go through a lot (even a cow) and can still be in a salvageable state.