Christopher Ward C65 Aquitaine GMT Clearance

The world traveller’s best friend

It’s little wonder that the GMT function has become one of the most popular and useful complications you can add to a sports watch. The Aquitaine GMT pairs Sellita’s much-admired SW330-2 movement – already used to great acclaim in the C63 Sealander GMT – with the C65’s gloriously understated retro looks, to make for the perfect travel companion.

GMT watches began with the Rolex GMT-Master of the mid-’50s, commissioned by Pan Am – then America’s largest international airline – at the beginning of the Jet Age, and intended to grace the pilots of their new Boeing 707 jetliners. Now they could keep track of both local time and GMT time – taken from a stripe on the ground at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, which marked the ‘Mean Time’ against which all Earth’s time zones were compared – simultaneously, vital for preventing potentially catastrophic confusion in the skies.

Naturally, these watches soon filtered through to the back of the plane too: not only were they immensely glamorous, branding you as a bold world traveller who crossed time meridians on the regular, but they were useful for anyone away from home.

Plus, of course, they looked great.

GMT complications are still glamorous and offer great utility, though the classic red-blue ‘Pepsi’ look is no longer de rigeur. The Aquitaine GMT is a case in point, its eye-catching GMT hand boasting a bold, blue arrowhead tip, while its contrasting bezel-and-dial combination is rendered in the cool combination of White Sand and Marine Blue.

Though it boasts undeniably classical, sophisticated 1950s style, not least thanks to its curved box sapphire crystal and domed sapphire bezel, Aquitaine GMT is every inch the modern sports watch beneath the hood: amongst its many innovations, for instance, is Dry Marshal, a safety indicator to remind you to tighten up the watch’s screw-down crown before you take it near the water.

As with all Aquitaines, the GMT boasts a singularly sleek, luxurious feel, and wears comfortably on a wide range of wrists thanks to a shorter lug-to-lug length than earlier C65s. It has enhanced water resistance, improved lume and a tapered bracelet with screwed links too, making it as capable as it is handsome. A purposeful but relatively restrained piece, it’s perfectly suited to the sophisticated world traveller with adventure in mind.

Christopher Ward donates five percent of the sales value of every C65 Aquitaine sold to Blue Marine Foundation, a charity working to protect our oceans and addressing the issue of overfishing. Over the next few years, we aim to raise over half a million pounds for Blue Marine.

Sellita SW330-2 GMT

The Sellita SW330-2 is an alternative to the ETA 2893, and a movement that provides both superb accuracy and GMT timing.

Just 4.1mm thick, the SW330-2 has 25 jewels and beats at a rate of 28,800 per hour with a power reserve of up to 56 hours. The central GMT hand can be set independently from the hour and seconds hands.