Scott Murdock, Military.com

The Canadian watchmaker offers pilot’s watches, specialty watches and general-purpose watches, but its crown jewels have always been its uncompromisingly tough dive watches. Now, Marathon is reissuing one of its classic search-and-rescue watches with a few modern touches to make it better than ever for service members in need of a timepiece that’s tougher than Neptune himself: the OSAR-D.

Alex Kierstein, MotorTrend

Quick—what’s the Jeep of watches? A rugged, GADA (go anywhere, do anything) sorta piece that won’t flood if you drop it in the mud? Quite a few pieces fit the bill—Citizen's Promaster Tough comes to mind—but it is to Jeep’s sincere credit that some knowing watch dorks might instantly conjure up a Marathon in their heads. Specifically, the -SAR (Search And Rescue) series—the quartz TSAR and the automatic GSAR. 

Watches of Espionage

We often assign greater value to watches that were issued to soldiers in days gone by, like the Rolex MilSub of the ‘80s, Marine National Tudor Submariners from the ‘60s, or the Omega SM300 examples ordered by the British Ministry of Defence during the same era. There’s something fascinating about a watch that was ordered for a purpose and field-tested by some of the hardest men and women on the planet. 

Kyle Snarr, Worn & Wound

For this latest edition of our ongoing Enthusiast Spotlight series, we’re excited to introduce you to 2nd Class Petty Officer Brock Stevens, a Navy Diver with over 5 years of active duty experience.

Kyle Snarr, Worn & Wound

When search and rescue pros from around the world reach for a mission timer, the Canada-based watchmaker Marathon has been a go-to solution for over 80 years. So, their SAR collection—short for, you guessed it, Search and Rescue—was an ideal catalog to outfit the team of pros who gathered to kick off this dip into the Pacific.

Mark Bernardo, Teddy Baldassarre

Marathon’s current range of dive watches debuted in the 1990s, made to specifications set by the Canadian government for watches worn by its military Search-and-Rescue divers (hence the SAR in all the model names; it’s one of many initialed names you’ll get used to as we run down the collection).