Just a couple days over a year ago I joined this site. I had maybe seen it in passing a time or two but a co-worker mentioned it to me as he was focusing in on a watch purchase. I hung around for a few days and took the plunge. What a wild, exhilarating, frustrating, stressing and rewarding year it has been.
For the better part of a decade, I owned one, then a second nice watch, working my way up to about four. Selling them never occurred to me, I had seen the accounts of horror stories. Then, about two months before I joined, I added a couple more, and determined that it made sense for some to go, and there were others I wanted. This place conditioned me to the concept of buying, selling, replacing watches as a reasonably safe (with vigilance and due diligence) practice.
Several people here have done more here in the course of a year, but I've done plenty, thank you. It wasn't intended to go like it has, but the whole thing just snowballed. I started out with this:
(I had a D. Freemont, a Bathys quartz and an old Accutron as well, but the url-nazis only permit 10 per post)
Within two weeks, my long-time watch guy got a Panerai that I didn't expect to like, but did. So...
(everybody made that photo but the Omega)
With that expenditure, it was time to sell my first watch, the two-tone Chronomat. Sold it here, seamless.
At that time, this place was in complete Steelfish fever, and I caught it as well. Second new watch in first month:
So, another one had to go, the Chronospace. Sold it, now two months in, and here comes the Navitimer:
...and there go the Omega, the Bathys and the Ulysse Nardin GMT.
So, things looked to calm down a bit with this lineup:
That was a good lineup. I was happy with this lineup--for a grand total of about two months. Then, like a lunk falling for a supermodel, I fell for this:
And with that, goodbye two-month-old Steelfish and goodbye three month old Panerai, leaving the GMT Master, two-month old Navi Heritage, and Breguet. I had switched from a black to a pepsi bezel on the GMT to freshen it up. Life was again pretty good, missing a fourth watch but having a Breguet. Then I found the fourth watch...
I was working my way towards doing the unthinkable for me, selling my first good watch, the Rolex, after realizing by comparison how flimsy the old hollow-end links were and how thin the case felt ( that model was among the thinnest GMTs), and hatching a plan to buy an IWC Cousteau 2010...when life happened, as it sometimes does. If I ran the world for just one day, high on the agenda would be ordaining that dental insurance actually cover something //steps off soapbox.
Anyway, a big bill demanded some sacrifice in the fun budget. The arduous decision-making process was chronicled here. I thought about selling one, selling two, deciding on one to keep. It would have been the Breguet, but at about that time the glitter had washed away from my prize beauty long enough for me to realize that a brown watch could never be my only watch. So, I sold all but the Headwind. I actually was going to sell it, too, until I found out what I somehow had missed when I bought it. I never questioned authenticity, they didn't copy Headwinds, but I did neglect to determine that the serial number had been buffed off. Damn, how did I miss that? Of course I know, Headwinds were hard to find and I was so overjoyed to find one I got sloppy. Lesson learned.
Still, even my wife saw my fire sale as rash, so like a rebound date, I picked up a JLC Master Compressor GMT.
With Headwind and JLC in hand, I moved on. Still, I missed not having a Rolex. It had been the cornerstone of my collection, and was always intended to be. After some time for the financial wounds to heal, and seeing how much a bracelet for a JLC would cost, bye bye, JLC, hello Yachtmaster. (You'll have to trust me here, damned url-limits)
So, let's see--that's the first nine months.
The Headwind and Yacht are really good together, (still had the Accutron but sold the Freemont too) but some color was missing. I seem to need blue in my watch life, looked all over, thought about what I wanted to pay, what I could get, then went off the board for a Sinn Arktis. As I visited my watch guy to get fitted with the bracelet, what did he just get but a Navi Fighters. That was a no-brainer.
So now, after a year of this, I have moved a couple of steps forward, a couple back, a couple sideways. The group pic minus the Headwind, which is getting a service:
Awful pic but it's nighttime, I have a droid camera and the lighting in the study is more ambience than illuminating.
Like I stated above, after a lot of watches, some forward, some back, some sideways. The Yacht and Navi Fighters are keepers and I'm as happy with them as I have been with any watch I have owned. I really like the Headwind, but it will be interesting to see how I feel about it after being without it for a couple of weeks for service, and about three weeks when it seemed to be slowing a bit. That one might be ready to go, but the buffed-out number might preclude that. I like the Sinn---but I haven't completely connected with it.
I have learned so much more about this little obsession of mine in the past year than I had in the nine prior years combined. I hate to think of how much time I have spent in this little corner of the internet over the past year but it has been considerable, and it is now the first place I go when I take a moment or four away from work and family. Elite deal seeker is another disease altogether. I have bought and sold more watches than I ever dreamed of owning. It's amazing to look back at it.
I would truly like to get a settled collection of, say, five pieces together by the end of this year, but I fear I'm just fooling myself. For all of it, though, it's been a fascinating ride. Thank you, curse you, BreitlingSource.
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