BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
The Captain Cook from Rado is a neat-looking diving watch that offers just enough to be a viable alternative to the usual diving watches we see on the forums. The last time we covered the Captain Cook was in February of last year, believe it or not, so we wanted to check in and see what they’ve been up to in the last year.
In all honesty, not much has changed. We’re still looking at a handsome watch with a bronze case like last year, but Rado has changed the straps around and altered the dial and bezel colour to make a fourth addition to their bronze Captain Cook range. That means you get a dial that’s legible and clean to look at with just enough to make it stand out against the competition while not going overboard. You also get a 42mm x 12.5mm bronze case which is within the normal scope of sizes for diving watches. You also get 300m of water resistance, although I can guarantee that maybe one in one thousand of these will see any serious action in the field, but it’s nice to know the watch is capable.
Rado adds this version that they call burgundy to the range of blue, green, and brown models of the bronze Captain Cook. I don’t have the best colour vision, but I’d say it doesn’t particularly look like burgundy in the digital mockups we’ve got in the press release, it seems more like a standard red, but only a live photoshoot can answer that question. Red colours are generally hard to reproduce with ceramic, which is the material of choice for the bezel. The bezel markers have been laser cut and then filled with white SuperLumiNova for some added utility.
Inside the watch is an ETA C07.611 which Rado calls the calibre 763, it has a 3Hz beat rate and a power reserve of 80-hours, it’s also automatically wound and has a date function which for reasons unknown has a white background, so it really stands out. Honestly, date windows with the wrong colour background should be illegal in 2021.
The watch comes with a burgundy NATO strap with a line of gold-coloured weave in the centre to break it up a little, and it also has a bronze pin-buckle. The price is €2680.
Visit Rado here.
