THREE HOURS OF SILENCE
The new Fifty Fathoms Tech carries Blancpain's 3-hour bezel: a complication born at depth, enabling divers to remain underwater for hours, as the ocean slowly reveals itself.
June 8 is the day the world turns its attention to the Ocean. For Blancpain, every day has been Ocean Day for more than two decades.
The Fifty Fathoms was born in 1953 as the first true diver’s tool watch. Today, the same spirit drives the new Fifty Fathoms Tech, and it drives the Blancpain Ocean Commitment, a program that has become one of the most consequential in marine exploration and preservation.
FIFTY FATHOMS TECH — THE TOOL HAS EVOLVED
Blancpain invented the secured rotating bezel. It is not a decorative element, it is a genuine horological complication with a life-saving function: allowing a diver to measure elapsed time underwater, and to know exactly when to surface. For seventy years, that bezel has turned in 60-minute increments. In 2023, Blancpain made it evolve by introducing a patented three-hour bezel on the Fifty Fathoms Tech Gombessa 70th Anniversary Act 2, developed by Marc A. Hayek and Laurent Ballesta.
The 3-hour bezel, a world first, was born from a specific need. Modern technical diving, particularly with closedcircuit rebreathers (CCR), involves extended dives at depth: two, three hours or more. A 60-minute bezel is simply insufficient. By rethinking the movement, Blancpain adapted the GMT complication — traditionally a 24-hour mechanism — to rotate in three hours instead. The result is a dedicated 3-hour hand and scale that gives technical divers, underwater photographers and scientists the precision they need, across the full duration of a dive.
Blancpain Ocean Commitment — More Than 20 Years of Science in the Field
When Marc A. Hayek joined Blancpain, one of his first initiatives was to bring together leading underwater photographers for a diving event in Thailand, held as part of the 50th anniversary of the Fifty Fathoms in 2003, and to inititate with PADI a citizen science program for the identification of whale sharks, inviting divers to submit their photographs to a shared database. That instinct — to use the diving community as a scientific resource, and to support projects with genuine potential — has defined the Blancpain Ocean Commitment ever since. The BOC name arrived in 2014, but the commitment predates it by more than a decade. What has never changed is the approach: Blancpain does not simply provide funding. It identifies promising projects, activates its networks, and builds long-term partnerships designed to generate real scientific and ecological outcomes.
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