A man on a boat looks out to sea, scanning for the danger lurking beneath the waves. He spots the foreboding shape of a triangular dorsal fin cutting through the waves towards a group of swimmers. He holds a Walkie up to his mouth. The watch on his wrist glints in the sun. The man is Oceanographer Matt Hooper (portrayed by the inimitable Richard Dreyfuss) and the film is of course JAWS, the seminal 1975 nautical horror classic that made a whole generation afraid of the water. But for some watch collectors, the drama centered not on the shark, but on what watch Richard Dreyfuss wore in the film. Decades passed before someone figured it out. In 2010, two brothers hit on the watch’s identify after years of poring over screen grabs and Google searches… and then uncovered an even greater mystery. The watch, it turned out, was an Alsta Nautoscaph. But as was the case with many mechanical watch brands after the Quartz Crisis, there was little for the brothers to go on once they made their discovery. Alsta no longer existed, and what information could be found about the brand was scarce. Thanks to the diligence of watch sleuths, the holes in the story have been filled in over the years. Alsta was a brand owned by the Alstater Watch Company of New York. Alstater primarily imported and cased Swiss-made watches, and then private-labeled them for sale under a number of different brand names, with Alsta being the one that’s most familiar to collectors today. The brand was reborn in 2014, it would seem, purely to reissue the nostalgic 'JAWS style' diving watches that were so hotly sought after for decades in the collector community - and they've done a great job with the modern homages. Of course, the original was an excellent jumping off point... The Nautoscaph line originally came in many variations, with the cushion-case version that Dreyfuss wore in JAWS of course being the fan-favorite. The 60-minute bezel and glossy black dial, featuring prominent coffin-shaped luminous indices with Arabic quadrants and an oversized handset gives the watch a distinctive look of its own while maintaining that 70s classic diver silhouette that we’ve come to know and love. This particular example is a Superautomatic variant, sized at 38.5mm, and shows signs of a life well lived, including some wear and polishing noted on the case, loss of printing on the bezel ring, and lume loss on the handset. It retains a crisp glossy black dial and loads of charm - the perfect accessory for any monster hunt!
