A Week With The Tudor Pelagos Ultra 1000 Meters

The two basic families of tool watches available from Tudor are the Black Bay and all its variants, and the Pelagos and all its variants (fewer than the Black Bay but there’s still a surprising range of Tudor Pelagos watches, including the underwater dead reckoning focused Pelagos FXD). You could make an argument for the the Ranger being a tool watch as well as it’s obviously meant to be a field watch, designed for folks who want a rugged watch but don’t feel a yearning for the extras in terms of specs and functionality that come with a dive watch, but I think it’s fair to say that the Black Bay and Pelagos really anchor the tool watch idiom at Tudor (and going on record that to this day I still miss the North Flag). Of the two, the Black Bay offers both solid specs (including 200M water resistance, general sturdiness, and Master Chronometer certification) with a general air of connection to Tudor’s past as a dive watch maker and supplier to the militaries of various nations.

The Pelagos, on the other hand, is Tudor’s take on a modern, high spec dive watch with no extraneous bells and whistles and little apparent interest in tugging at the heart strings of a nostalgist. There is nothing wrong with being a nostalgist about undersea human exploration – I grew up watching The Undersea World Of Jacques Cousteau, and can still remember his perpetually melancholy French voice saying in voiceover, “Octopusss, octopuss, your baybeez are dying” – but the unapologetic spareness and unsentimentality of the Pelagos has its own appeal. The original Pelagos is designed and rated for saturation diving, up to depths of 500 meters and is equipped with a helium escape valve; the first version launched in 2012 used a retuned ETA caliber and the second gen 2015 version upgraded the movement to the Master Chronometer certified MT5621. This year at Watches & Wonders, Tudor launched the latest version of the Pelagos, which is the up-spec’d Pelagos Ultra, now rated to 1000 meters and still of course carrying Master Chronometer certification and Tudor lent us one to test drive.

The Ultra is instantly recognizable as a Pelagos; the titanium case is just slightly larger than the 2nd gen Pelagos 500M, at 43mm x 14.5mm versus 42mm x 14.3mm for the 500M model; a small enough difference that you are not apt to notice it unless you have Princess And The Pea sensitivity to sub-millimeter variations in watch dimensions (which, hey, some people do). The bezel is matte ceramic as per the usual, with copious amounts of lume (everywhere; dial, markers, hands, bezel) and the titanium bracelet comes with a micro adjustable T-Fit Tudor clasp, with a visual indicator showing you which of the three micro-increments at which the bracelet’s currently sized.

Nobody has ever complained – or I don’t think anyone’s ever complained, and I’d fight them on it if they did – about legibility and the Pelagos is as easy to read as you would expect for a piece of technical diving gear. The matte finishes on the bracelet, case, and dial keep any distractions from seeing the time and elapsed time to a minimum – I mean, distractions are basically nonexistent – and the hands in low light thanks to the light-absorbing finish on the dial, seem to be even larger than their actual size.

The bezel feels the way some people say closing the door on a Mercedes-Benz used to feel (maybe it still does feel that way, I forget how long it’s been since I closed the door on a Merc, vintage or modern). There is absolutely no play whatsoever; the bezel clicks crisply and precisely from one minute to the next; this is a sixty click bezel which gives you less resolution, I suppose, than a 120 click bezel but it also gives  you very positive tactile feedback on the increments.

At 1000 meters water pressure is a hair over 1400 psi (pounds per square inch) so inching up towards a ton, and as with Rolex, Tudor tests its watches, as we found out during our visit to the Tudor factory in Le Locle earlier this year, to 25% overpressure so every Ultra is rated to 1000M but has been pressure tested to 1250 meters, or a little over 1800 psi.

Interestingly enough, a human being who is acclimated to pressure at depth, can actually dive deeper than a nuclear attack submarine. The maximum theoretical depth for saturation diving is probably around 1000 meters and you’d think that a human body would be instantly crushed by the pressure at such depths. However, if a human being is gradually brought to the working depth pressure, their body will absorb enough helium (the breathing gas used for saturation diving; nitrogen is the neutral gas we breathe from the atmosphere at sea level but it becomes toxic at depth, and so helium is used as a neutral gas replacement in technical diving gas mixtures) to push back against the water pressure. Below a certain depth oxygen itself beings to become toxic and even helium can induce intoxication; no one has ever gone deeper than 700 meters (a record set by COMEX in 1992) but it’s generally agreed that 1000 meters is the absolute theoretical limit. The test depth usually quoted for a Seawolf class attack submarine is 500 meters or so, with a crush depth of 1000 meters.

The HEV or Helium Release Valve is a point over which watch enthusiasts differ. The basic problem is that if you are breathing a technical gas for saturation diving, the neutral gas is helium and helium is a tiny atom which can find its way into the interior of a watch case despite the gaskets. As helium builds up inside the case so does pressure, and if you’re decompressing, as the exterior pressure drops, the higher pressure inside the case can blow off the crystal. The helium escape valve lets overpressure helium escape safely; the other option is to build a case with a gasketing system that doesn’t let helium inside in the first place. Both systems have their benefits and drawbacks, although with an HEV you always have a failsafe built into the watch.

As with most objects built to fulfill a somewhat extreme technical specification, the Pelagos Ultra has its own aesthetic which is not the result of trying to create emotionally appealing design, but rather of building a tool to do a job. The bevels on the case and around the crown guard look great; they also make the watch easier to wear and help protect the crown against impacts that might compromise the case tube gaskets.

It’s an enormously satisfying watch. I have only two criticisms. The first is that the buckle has a small tab for lifting up the fliplock, which is in the shape of the Tudor shield; the bottom of the shield comes to a point and it digs into the underside of your fingernail when you open the clasp. The second is that I wish this watch had drilled lugs. The optional strap is wonderful but changing to a strap if you get the watch on the titanium bracelet (which you should do) means either having someone at a Tudor boutique do it for you, or unscrewing a link, opening up the bracelet, using a tool which you are presumably dextrous enough to use without scratching the case, to open up the spring bars, and then swapping in the strap. There is a lot of DIY pleasure in changing out the strap for a bracelet or vice versa and it would be really fantastic to have drilled lugs to make it easier.

And that’s really it. In a week of daily wear, by the way, the watch wandered a bit back and forth on its rate by perhaps half a second a day (it’s hard to tell without putting on a Timegrapher) but at the end of one week it was half a second fast. I think it was a half a second fast; that may be down to user measurement error. This is a hard watch to beat from a price – value perspective. The spec for depth is an abstraction for most of us but it also reflects a reality of technical diving – that 1000 meters is the absolute limit for saturation diving given the known limits of human physiology – and the overall construction and exhaustive test regimen to which every single one of the Pelagos Ultras that ends up being available for sale, must undergo, lends them real street, or abyss, cred. Perhaps the ultimate, daily-wearable high spec dive watch on the market right now.

The Tudor Pelagos Ultra: case and bracelet, titanium, 1000M water resistant; 43mm x 14.5mm, with matte black ceramic 60 click bezel. Movement, caliber MTMT5612-U, 65 hour power reserve, COSC and Master Chronometer certified (METAS) with resistance to magnetic fields of at least 15,000 gauss. The 1916 Company is an authorized retailer for Tudor watches.