This $369 Chronograph Brings Back a Coveted Vintage Style

If you’re balking at the price of mid-century yacht timers, have a look at Yema’s latest offering.

Published July 31, 2024

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Purpose-built tool watches garner appreciation for their dedicated features even among those who never plan to use them as intended.

The timing bezel of a dive watch can be used to time all sorts of land-based activities. The slide rule bezel of a pilot’s chronograph can be used to calculate your tip at a restaurant.

Then there’s the regatta timer. These watches, which gained some popularity in the 1960s and ’70s and were produced by a wide variety of brands, are chronographs designed for the specific and quirky rules of regattas, AKA, yacht racing.

Yema Yachtingraf Croisière

$369 at Yema

What Is a Regatta Timer?

The watches accomplish this feat by splitting their chronograph registers into five-minute increments, usually displayed in contrasting bright colors to make their delineations easier to distinguish. This is a necessity in timing the start of regattas, which rely on five-minute warning horns to get the boats ready to race.

Few watch collectors who own yacht timers are actually using the watches for their intended purpose, and instead, they tend to value them for their colorful dials and sometimes asymmetric layouts.

colorful chronograph on wrist with blue jacket — TAG Heuer’s Carrera “Skipper” is the benchmark for modern regatta timers.

The most recognizable example is the vintage Heuer Carrera “Skipper” with its tri-colored 15-minute subdial. which was (and still is) a hot commodity among vintage collectors prior to TAG Heuer reviving the style last year. It’s now one of the most lauded and popular watches in the brand’s modern catalog, and TAG even added a version in rose gold earlier this year.

But not all regatta timer watches have to be expensive (the Skipper starts at $6,750 in steel). As proof, French brand Yema has resurrected one of its own colorful yachting styles from the 1960s — and priced it under 400 bucks.

The Yema Yachtingraf Croisière

Yema’s new Yachtingraf reissue is all vintage style and bright colors.

Yema

The new Yema reissue is able to keep costs down thanks to its use of a meca-quartz movement. The VK63 caliber from Seiko combines a quartz movement for the main timekeeping with a mechanical chronograph module on top of it. So while the watch’s hours and minutes maintain quartz accuracy, its chronograph functions just like on a mechanical watch — smooth-sweeping seconds hand, clicky pushers and all.

As for the design of the watch, it’s straight out of the mid-century. The case measures 38.5mm across and has twisted lugs, pump-style pushers and is topped by a 2mm tall domed Hesalite crystal.

yema watch on a mans wrist — The combination of a big eye chronograph with a regatta timer is like catnip for vintage chronograph fans.

The watch is water resistant to 100m — which will come in pretty handy should you actually wear this thing on a boat — and features BGW9 Super-LumiNova on its hands for nighttime readability.

But let’s be real, the star of the show here is the dial. In recreating its own vintage design, Yema has brought all of the quirks of its mid-century watch to its modern catalog.

The 9 o’clock chronograph register is a thirty-minute counter split into six five-minute segments of varying bright colors, ideal for timing the 15-minute pre-race countdowns. This subdial is also larger to make it even more pronounced and legible, another favored vintage quirk known as a “big eye” chronograph.

a vintage yema watch — The vintage Yachtingraf Croisière provided the template for the new model, but they’re not exact duplicates.

The 3 o’clock subdial is a 24-hour counter, which is not drawn from the vintage model but is instead a function of the VK63 movement. It features an inverted Swiss cross colored to match one of the colors from the other subdial, which is a style borrowed from the 12-hour counter on some vintage examples. Minimized at 6 o’clock is the running seconds counter, which is color-matched to the dial.

Pricing and Options

The Yema Yachtingraf Croisière comes in two eye-catching colorways. One features a deep blue dial with accents of white, light blue and bright red on the subdials. The other has a white dial with teal and yellow accents.

Both styles are available on your choice of a stainless steel mesh bracelet for $399, or a stitched leather strap (navy for the blue dial, white for the white dial) for just $369.

yema watch dial closeup — The white dial version is less traditional but no less colorful.

The watches are available to order now directly from Yema’s website, with the first batch of 250 watches expected to ship out on August 10.

These new Yahctingrafs are hard to argue with. The style, sizing and colors are all on point, and if you’re looking for a (far) more affordable alternative to the TAG Heuer Skipper, I honestly don’t think you can do any better than this.