Why I sold my favourite watch – the 2008 Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean 42mm

Fergus Nash

When a wound is fresh it hurts the most to prod it, but the earlier the treatment begins the sooner the healing process can resolve. Some of you may have previously read my admittedly numerous articles mentioning my 2008 Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean, including this veritable love poem to the watch as I declared that it would be my most-worn watch of 2021. Even though my first watch, and one that I am certain that I’ll never sell, was my great-grandfather’s 1958 Seamaster that I had fixed up, my partner of nearly four years told me that the Planet Ocean was the one they most strongly associated with me as “my” watch, and that everything else I’d ever owned was just “some other watch”. This isn’t going to be a story of seller’s remorse, and it’s not going to be a story about raking in “investment” profits. Instead, I’m going to weave the tale of why I sold my favourite watch, and why it could happen to you.

This story does get personal, and perhaps strays into territory that I shouldn’t be admitting as a watch reviewer, but I will start at the beginning. The year is 2019, and I’d begun working at my first full-time job in audio post-production. I’d been wearing my heirloom 1958 Seamaster for about six months after its repairs, and I thought I was set for life in terms of watches. But, when that first monthly payment came in, all the possibilities started swirling through my head. I used a big chunk of my first paycheque on building my dream guitar, which I still play on a nearly daily basis, and then spent the next month researching watches on my lunch breaks. My work in live music was still viable in the pre-Covid years, so I wanted something that I wouldn’t be afraid of knocking around microphone stands and belligerent band members like I was with the vintage piece. I’d been previously smitten with the Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch – as we all are at some point – but that was well out of my budget. I was also a huge fan of Casino Royale starring Daniel Craig, and then I stumbled across what he wore in the film.

I can still feel the butterflies I felt then, as I felt obsession course through my veins scouring Gumtree, eBay, Marketplace, Chrono24, Chronext and a myriad of other vendors trying to find a Planet Ocean that I could afford. At the time I was still a watch novice, but this experience gave me a rapid course in spotting minute details. Pretty soon I could tell the differences between the Planet Ocean iterations, even within that same generation. I saw a few of the Limited Edition versions with the 007-counterbalance on the seconds hand, and I started learning about watch diameters and the effect they play in comfort. I’d had a few offers rejected to the absolute limit of what I could afford, which was $3000 AUD, and eventually I struck gold through an eBay listing for the watch of my dreams. It was the 42mm version which was released around the same time as Quantum of Solace, but being the same black-on-black colour scheme as Bond’s watch from Casino Royale I was happy to opt for the version that fit my smaller wrists better than the 45.5mm monster that I’d previously been bidding on. The condition looked pretty great for a watch that had clearly been worn and loved before, and with a recent service receipt I was too excited to worry about whether or not it had papers (after all, if a factory can copy a watch, they can certainly copy a document).

I sent the seller a message as he was only a suburb away from me and we arranged to meet at his doorstep. I was frantically refreshing my bank account on payday, waiting for the money to drop in, and then as soon as it came I rushed to withdraw cash and raced to the seller’s house. Maybe I was rash and hasty, but I got vibes from the seller and we had a little chat about watches as we made the exchange. With the watch and box in my bag, the giddy excitement began that would last weeks.

This is unfortunately where the seeds of negativity begin to sprout, as watches can do strange things to our minds. That $3000 AUD was more than a month’s pay, and I’d just spent it less than two hours after it had come in. Instantly, my perception of money and value had become warped, and it shaped my collecting habits for years to come. While most people on the kind of salary I had would have considered a $300 watch a luxury, my next year or so became a flurry of purchases, flips and trades. Some highlights I’d like to pick out were a 1940s Omega with a repainted dial, a Straton Syncro with the Seiko NE88 movement, a Longines Avigation BigEye, a King Seiko 4502-7001 from 1971, and more recently a Cartier Tank Basculante. All of these watches were great, and some of them were even sold at a margin, but although I enjoyed wearing them I now believe that I had bought them for that instant dopamine hit you get when you spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars in one single purchase.

Only three or four years have passed, but they were incredibly formative years, and my feelings around that 2008 Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean have only grown stronger. It came with me on some of the most significant journeys of my life, accompanying the experiences which defined me as an independent person. It reminded me not only of the weekend trips I took it on, and not only of the film which I loved so much, but I had also imprinted upon it a loose connection to the memory of Chris Cornell who sang the Casino Royale theme song, and whose death still affects me since 2017. You can go back and read my previous article about it if you want to know the things I loved in regards to its visual features, but I’ve come to realise that the place it has in my heart is almost entirely separate to the physical object.

So, that brings us to the present day. I’d always assumed that I loved that watch too much to sell it, but 2021 in particular brought with it a lot of time for introspective thought and consideration. I thought about what means most to me, and how my life reflects that. The more I pondered it, the less comfortable I felt about the entire idea of owning a watch that was worth so much. It’s difficult to express why selling a watch I bought for $3000 for $4750 was not a financial decision, but at its core it was about freeing myself. The physical object of the Planet Ocean was something I liked, but I didn’t love it. It was tied up in a masculinity that I was steadily moving away from, and wearing it in public had started to feel like some kind of mean boast.

I still have the holiday photos, I still watch Casino Royale at least once a year, and I still listen to plenty of Chris Cornell. Once it dawned on me that I didn’t need to wear or even own the watch to continue loving it, listing it up for sale became a no-brainer. I priced it at $5000 AUD, matching the lowest priced Planet Ocean of its ilk I could find online, and in just a few days a buyer approached me with that fair $4750 offer, given that there were no original papers and I’d lost that service receipt. We spoke in depth, and he had actually read my previous articles and knew its back-story already. He gave the watch as a gift to his lucky father, who is overjoyed.

To be completely honest, it was my first pang of post-sale regret that spurred me on to write this in-depth story as a form of grief recovery, but I’m glad to say that it has really worked. Comparsion is a term often used as the opposite of jealousy, and that is what I feel for the latest owner of that 2008 Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean. I feel much more comfortable with a slightly humbler watch collection, and my new DOXA 600T Sharkhunter fills the black-dial-diver hole on my watch shelf perfectly, with a few extra thousand still in the bank. I hope that you feel inspired to take a closer look at the things you own and what exactly it is about them that sparks joy. You may find yourself even more attached to them, or you may decide to let someone else share in that memory-making we call watch collecting.