My Complicated Relationship With The Rolex Yacht-Master II, And Thoughts On Correctness In Terminology
Why "grand feu" Daytona dials are the least of our problems.
The first year that Rolex officially joined Watches & Wonders, was 2023 and it was the single biggest seismic shift in the structure of the annual trade shows since 1939, which was the first year Rolex showed at the predecessor to Baselworld, the Schweizer Mustermesse Basel. (For a wide angle view of the history of the shows, check out Greg Gentile’s story, “A History of Watch Fairs,” at the 1916 Company’s Journal). At the same time, from a consumer standpoint, the death of Baselworld and the move by Rolex to Watches & Wonders, which is descended from the SIHH (which was originally a luxury only show meant to stand apart from the hurly burly of Baselworld) was almost entirely inconsequential. Rolex dominates Watches & Wonders exactly as it used to dominate Baselworld; the watches are still announced in the same yearly cadence and still follow the Rolex playbook of often incremental changes to existing product lines, with technical improvements rolling out on a regular basis, and generally unsung by both the brand and by its customers.
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It passed oddly enough, without much comment, but Rolex did something this year that in three decades of covering watches, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them do, and that was to release a new watch which is actually a reintroduction of a discontinued complication, but updated and improved – or at least, improved from a certain point of view, depending on how emotionally and conceptually attached you were to the previous version and to its inarguably idiosyncratic user interface.
The Yacht-Master name stands out a bit at Rolex, partly because it refers, confusingly, to two totally different watches, and partly because the actual operation of the YMII is not straightforward, although it is as of 2026 much more intuitive than it used to be. The Yacht-Master name means, on the one hand, a sort of luxury version of the Submariner, which was first introduced by Rolex in 1992, and which emphasizes precious metals (particularly in the bezel) and which has a bidirectional bezel rather than the one way bezel found on the Sub. The name Yacht-Master II, on the other hand, means a complicated, programmable, countdown flyback and fly-forward chronograph, which was designed as a regatta timer and which in its first version, was made from 2007 to 2024. That watch was 44mm x 14mm, and used the Rolex caliber 4161, and it was the most complicated watch Rolex had ever made, along with the Sky-Dweller. Both watches used a unique-to-Rolex switching system called the Ring Command Bezel, which is used to select the function of the crown in both watches.
The Yacht-Master II in both the original and newly released versions, is a watch designed to count down the time before sailing yachts may cross the start line at the beginning of a regatta. Usually the way this works is that there is an audible signal – by tradition a starting gun is fired from the committee boat, which supervises the start of the race; horn blasts can also be used – which signals the start of the countdown to the moment when the yachts may cross the starting line. This interval is usually anywhere from five to ten minutes, depending on the race rules, and as the countdown progresses, there are audible signals at each elapsed minute. The idea is for skippers to cross the line as close as possible to the actual starting time, and yachts maneuver briskly in order to ensure they do so. Crossing early, however, can incur serious penalties, including having to reverse course and cross the line again, or a time penalty, or even outright disqualification. Regatta timer watches are designed to give the skipper an exact visual indication of the remaining time before yachts are allowed to cross the line.
The Ring Command Bezel on the Yacht-Master II was a large, blue ceramic affair with the numbers one to ten deeply engraved, and with the words “Yacht-Master II” along the bottom edge, and taking up almost a quarter of the diameter of the bezel. You can program the timer to count down anything from one to ten minutes. To set the countdown time, you turn the Ring Command Bezel a quarter turn to the left and unscrew the crown. This locks the lower chronograph pusher and you then pull the crown out to the first position, and set the countdown minute hand to the desired number of minutes. Push the crown back in and screw it down, rotate the bezel back to its neutral position, and you are ready to start the race.
When you hear the first gun or horn, you start the countdown timer and in the first version of the Yacht-Master II, the minute and chronograph seconds hand both begin turning to the right to count down the time. This is the basic functionality of all regatta timers, but the Yacht-Master II has a neat trick: if you have started the chronograph too early or too late and you realize this after hearing the subsequent countdown signals, you can resynchronize the watch on the fly by pressing the lower chronograph pusher. This causes the seconds hand to fly back to the zero position and start running again immediately, and it also causes the chronograph minute hand to fly back to the nearest minute, or fly forward to the nearest minute; the hand will fly back if it has been less than 30 seconds since the last minute, or fly forward if it has been more than 30 seconds (you perform the first maneuver if you started the chronograph early, and the latter if you started it late).
I don’t own a regatta timer, but I have always found them enormously appealing because they’re designed for such a specific environment. Regattas are not exclusively a rich person’s hobby. While researching this story, I realized I had a slightly distorted perspective on this owing to the watch industry exposure I have had to regattas. The first one I ever attended was the Opera House Cup, during a period when Panerai was extensively involved in classic yachting. The Opera House Cup is the grand finale of Nantucket Race Week in August, and it was quite an introduction as I was a guest on board one of the competing yachts: the extraordinarily beautiful 68 foot long yawl, Black Watch, which was constructed by the firm of Sparkman and Stephens at the Nevins Shipyard. The experience was most authentic and memorable. Her master, as I came aboard with a weather sealed DSLR and telephoto lens, rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, great, another fucking photographer,” and I also learned what the term “rail monkey” means; it was an exciting race on a gloriously beautiful August day and almost too exciting as another yacht just missed clipping our stern at the finish line – her bow came so close you could have jumped across the gap. This event and subsequent classic yacht regattas gave me the impression that the sport was for aristos and blue bloods solamente.
However, regattas may be organized for a whole plethora of classes, the smallest of which are the Optimist class of dinghies, which are seven feet nine inches overall, and which cost just a few thousand dollars (although competitive racing versions can get up there, closer to seven thousand). Still, the aura of exclusivity that seems to surround regattas is hard to dispel. Notwithstanding my failure to this day to own a yacht, attending a few regattas has given me the feeling of taking a proprietary interest in regatta timers, and so my longstanding fascination with the Yacht-Master II. You might see a Yacht-Master II on the wrist of a 14 year old at the tiller of an Optimist on race day, but that is not the way to bet.
The extremely small potential audience for mechanical regatta timers is a great deal of the reason they are so fascinating, and the fact that the Yacht-Master II really doubles down on hyper-specificity is a very big part of its appeal. The fact that it is what you might call an extremely extroverted watch (I even heard the YMII called a “gaudy monstrosity” on one occasion, although that’s not how I feel about them) and that it has several inexplicable features, including a redundant double 10 minute countdown scale (on the bezel and on the dial) and the legend YACHT-MASTER in letters tall enough to be seen from space; just made it even more cool, at least for me. It always seemed to me to be one of the most quintessentially Rolex of all Rolex watches in its combination of functional complexity with Veblen-on-the-wrist visual signaling, and that there was, in a sense, no reasoning with the watch, is exactly what gave it its appeal.
All this is by way of saying that I’m not sure how I feel about a more “sensible” version of the Yacht-Master II.
Gone is the Ring Command Bezel; in is the new caliber 4162. The countdown timer is now programmed and operated exclusively through the use of the two chronograph pushers on the side of the case, and the bezel is now a conventional, bidirectional Cerachrom bezel. To program the countdown interval, you press the lower chronograph pusher until the countdown minute hand points to the correct number. Once that’s done, you push the upper pusher to start the countdown when you hear the first starting gun or horn. The minute and seconds countdown hands will begin to run and you can see exactly the number of minutes and seconds remaining until you can cross the starting line. The 2026 Yacht-Master II also retains the flyback/fly forward functionality of version 1.0.
Aside from dispensing with the Ring Command Bezel there are another couple of interesting features in the Yacht-Master II 2026. The first is that during countdown, the countdown minute and seconds hands actually move counterclockwise – they moved in a clockwise direction in version 1.0. The second is that after the countdown’s finished, the countdown seconds hand will continue to run anticlockwise until you push the upper chrono pusher again to stop the chronograph. (This is also true of version 1.0 except in that case, the chrono seconds hand is running clockwise and therefore seems less out of the ordinary). I can’t think of any practical use case for this, but it is certainly exactly the sort of quirky individuality which we have come to expect from the Yacht-Master II.
There is absolutely no doubt that version 2.0 is an improvement in every meaningful respect. It is mechanically simpler for identical functionality; legibility is improved; it is easier to program the elapsed time interval (and you no longer have to unscrew the crown to do it, which was, let’s face it, an odd feature in a nautically themed watch) and the elimination of the Ring Command Bezel means the space is freed up for a more versatile, usable, and altogether more sensible elapsed time bezel (the only thing keeping this version of the YMII from being a bona fide diver’s watch is that the bezel is two-way; the 100M depth rating is within the range prescribed by the diver’s watch standard, ISO 6425. I wonder why Rolex didn’t just go ahead and make the bezel unidirectional; possibly The Crown may have felt that a 100M depth rating would not be on-brand for a dive watch with a depth rating less than that of the 300M Submariner. This notwithstanding, you can certainly swim or even go recreational scuba diving with the YMII 2.0 if you are so inclined, given that recreational scuba diving usually doesn’t go deeper than 40 meters or so).
That said, I miss the perverse fascination of the Ring Command Bezel, and the oddities of the layout and operation of the YMII 1.0. That it was designed for so practical an application, and that it went about it so bizarrely, and that such a great degree of mechanical ingenuity was deployed to actually make it harder to do something than it should have been, gave the watch a kind of deadpan stubbornness that to me, really exemplified Rolex’s legendary disregard for the court of public opinion. YMII 1.0 may not have had wearability, practicality, or certain aspects of utility on its side, but in its own august disregard for anything other than its own approach – by God, it had character. I had the same feeling about the now discontinued Milgauss; the fact that its approach to antimagnetism had been rendered obsolete by silicon years ago, and that if you got right down to it, if you were buying one, you were buying a wristwatch built around the requirements of a cyclotron operator in 1957 (the year that CERN introduced its first particle accelerator, the Synchrocyclotron, and just one year after the Milgauss was launched) is exactly what made it so appealing (well, that and the lightning bolt seconds hand). The pointless bombast of the YACHT-MASTER on that screaming blue bezel was just icing on the cake; it was an exercise in ostentation even more fun than gunning the engine of your Veyron at a four way intersection (not that I’ve ever done that either). This is very much a “it’s not you, it’s me” situation; Rolex did pretty much everything right in revising the complication. But practicality isn’t everything. What we all really want from Rolex, after all, is for Rolex to never stop being Rolex, and the Ring Command Bezel – and YACHT-MASTER validating your desire to be perceived as the Master of a Yacht – was Rolex to a T.
On Making Grand Feu Enamel Dials, And Accuracy In Historical Terminology
Speaking of Rolex, one of the other kerfuffles (if you can call it that) to come out of Watches & Wonders 2026, was the one around the question of whether or not the enamel dial on the off-catalog Daytona ref. 126502 can correctly be referred to as “grand feu” enamel. The question is further complicated by the fact that one point of contention – the use of a ceramic base for the dial – did not actually originate with Rolex, at least according to a couple of sources. And, there is also the question of how American watchmakers, like Elgin and Waltham, were able to make what we think of as a product which is necessarily small batch, and artisanal in scale, by the millions. How we see what we see depends on what we know; context is king.
Before that, though, this week’s highly recommended reading: “Accuracy Features Of Early Quartz Watches,” at the Performance Watch Review. If you have ever wondered exactly how thermoregulation works in high precision quartz watches, wonder no more. A new story from Velociphile on why an almost unnoticed debut from Chopard represents a sea change in antimagnetic watches. And, fun factoid of the week, “Yachtmaster” is an actual international certification.
The aura of exclusivity around grand feu enamel dials has to do with the impression we have that making them requires enormous skill, is time consuming, and requires manual processes that do not scale.