Tudor At Ten: A Decade With A Tudor Black Bay

In 2015, I brought home a Tudor Black Bay, with a black bezel. The Black Bay was still a relatively new model; the first had been launched in 2012, and Tudor had been back in the United States for only a year at that point, having opened its first door at Fourtané, in Carmel, during Monterey Car Week. Since then, Tudor has grown by leaps and bounds in the US market and abroad, and has expanded the Black Bay family of watches to include a variety of materials (including ceramic, bronze, sterling silver, and even 18k yellow gold) sizes, and functions (GMT and chronographs) and today, if you put all the different Black Bay variants in Tudor’s current catalog together, you’ve got 117 – that’s right, 117 – different models to choose from.

The 2015 model was the first Black Bay with a black bezel (the watch had a red bezel at launch) and this was also the last year in which Tudor would use the ETA 2824 exclusively in the Black Bay; Tudor’s first Black Bay models with its first in-house movements, made in partnership with Kenissi, would debut in 2016, and in 2021, Master Chronometer certification would be introduced in the Black Bay Ceramic.

In the decade since I picked up mine, the Black Bay has become Tudor’s signature model – it’s got elements of Tudor’s history in its general design and especially in its snowflake hands. There are of course plenty of other options from Tudor if you want a sports watch, including the Pelagos, Ranger, and Royal models, but the Black Bay’s canny combination of vintage design cues and modern movement technology makes it a very compelling value proposition.

I loved mine right out of the box. My first impressions were pretty uniformly positive; I remember thinking that the case was a little bit slab-sided, but then, and now, that just seemed like part of the watch’s appeal. The Black Bay is obviously not for folks who absolutely detest any manifestation of nostalgia as an overt design element, but the gilt, “ROTOR SELF-WINDING” text, snowflake hands and Tudor rose on the dial and crown never seemed heavy handed to me. They all work together and the chunky case just seems part and parcel of the pragmatism of the watch overall – nostalgia-tinged pragmatism, maybe, but pragmatism nonetheless.

I wore the Black Bay pretty much on a daily basis for the first couple of years that I had it, with occasional breaks for some of the other watches in my daily wear rotation, which at various times has meant a couple of Seiko divers, a Grand Seiko or two, a Tudor Ranger, and the first “good Swiss watch” I ever owned, which is an Omega Speedmaster from the 1990s. I don’t think I’m careless with my watches but I don’t baby them either, as a general rule (although I’m instinctively less devil-may-care with dress watches on straps) and the Black Bay especially didn’t seem to ask for any special treatment; it has picked up its fair share of normal wear and tear over the years, none of which has particularly affected its functionality. While my BB is running a supplied movement, Tudor adjusted its 2824s to run pretty closely and out of the box my Black Bay was two seconds a day fast, which was more than good enough for me; I didn’t bother to have it regulated and although it’s running a little more erratically today than ten years ago, it’s still good for around five to seven seconds a day.

After the first couple of years of pretty heavy wear, the Black Bay became an occasional but regular daily driver – right now, I’m actually going through a period, since about the beginning of the year, of wearing it more often, although I’ve been alternating it a bit in the last month or two with another tool watch, which is a Citizen 40th Anniversary Aqualand. The two watches are obviously different in a number of important respects – history, what they represent in the context of each brand; price; technology (the Citizen is a battery powered quartz watch with an electronic depth gauge bulging out of the side of the case) but they have in common that they both feel unapologetically practical and purpose-directed.

Things that I loved about the Black Bay ten years ago and still love:

First, the overall design. It might be pushing the point too far to talk about the Black Bay and aesthetics, but like anything made by human hands, the Black Bay was designed, and its design has lost none of its charm a decade later; the mix of clarity, practicality, and old-school gilt-edged charm is a solid one.

Second, the bezel; it’s anodized aluminum, and I know that ceramic’s more scratch and scuff resistant but anodized aluminum feels both appropriately retro and appropriately unostentatious. The feel of the bezel is as fantastic now, by the way, as it was ten years ago; it still clicks sharply into position at every seconds marker, and for some reason, it has nary a scratch. Maybe the domed sapphire crystal has been taking hits for it the way Jupiter keeps asteroids from smacking Earth, but for whatever reason, it’s clean as a whistle.

Third, and this is a biggie for someone like me who loves things that glow in the dark as much now as I did when I was four, the lume. I know practically speaking that Super-LumiNova doesn’t degrade over time, and I know it’s chemically stable enough that it should reliably glow when charged for decades, but the lume is applied with a generous hand on the dial of the Black Bay – it’s one of those watches that glows so brightly that it can startle me when I get into the elevator in my building after a walk on a sunny day.

Fourth, the excellent overall build quality. This is not an expensive watch as Swiss watches go – a hair over three thousand bucks in 2015, although like everything else, it’s gotten more expensive, not less, over the last decade – and it is not crammed with extraneous details by any means, although not being crammed with extraneous details is a feature, not a bug, especially in this kind of watch. What details there are, however, are all well handled. Machining, dial printing, crown embossing, the general fit and finish of the hands and dial markers and the gracefully machined bevels on the lugs, all feel modestly handsome and of obviously good quality.

Fifth, although there’s not a whole lot more to say than that I like it, I like the crown tube. I like the way the crown, which is large, comfortable, and easy to grasp, sits just slightly proud of the case, and since I’m on the subject of the crown tube, I ought to add that the crown screws in and out with the precision and sense of security of a submarine hatch.

Sixth, setting the time. I’ve handled some extremely expensive watches from some mighty hifalutin’ names which have had a really inexplicable amount of slop in the keyless works; I name no names but one of them had a minute hand that would inconsistently and frustratingly jump at least 30 seconds out of position when the crown was pushed back in. Hand setting in the Black Bay – this was true on day one, and it’s still true ten years later – is both very smooth and very precise; there’s no movement in the hands at all, period, when the crown’s pushed back in and there is just enough resistance in the movement of the hands to make getting the tip of the minute hand exactly on a given minute or hour marker, as easy as you please.

There are really just two places where the owner of a Black Bay is going to interact physically with the watch in terms of manipulating its components: the bezel and the crown, and in both cases, functional interactions are irreproachable.

After ten years, the watch is overdue for a service, although you’d never know it from its performance, other than the fact that the daily rate’s loosened up a little bit – and you can’t hold that against it, it’s a ten year old precision machine that’s never so much as had a cleaning, and it does just keep on keepin’ on. I’m probably going to have it serviced before the end of the year, or maybe at the beginning of the next, but that’s more out of a sense of wanting to stick to best practices in caring for the watch, than because it shows signs of needing one.

At some point, I’d like to add another Tudor to the lineup, although I’m not sure which – probably, although not certainly, it would be a Pelagos; the Pelagos models I’ve handled and test-driven share a lot of the virtues of the Black Bay collection, including feeling reassuringly overbuilt and eminently practical and pleasurable to use on a daily basis. The charm of this ten year old Black Bay is hard to beat, though, and it’s the kind of charm you only get from a felicitous admixture of high quality and daily use. I’ve grown into it, over the years, and I like to think that some of the virtues in the watch have something to offer to its owners in terms of character aspirations. You could do a lot worse than offering reliable daily performance, consistent delivery of high quality experiences, and – something which is on my mind a little more than it was ten years ago – the ability to age gracefully, and make the accumulation of years, you betcha, a feature, not a bug.

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