Chrono Critique: A review of the Marnaut Dark Surge trio - this one is all about personal nostalgia. For the rest of you, it’s a great looking watch

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. This is as personal as a watch can get without being a gift from a close family member!

These watches are all about personal nostalgia, one that will transport you back to your childhood. For the rest, it’s a great looking watch

Full disclosure notice: Over the past year or so I was lucky enough to become friends with Mario, the owner of Marnaut. This has surely had an influence on my writing and it’s important to point out. However, there was absolutely no money exchanged for this review and Mario doesn’t even know it’s coming out now.

--------------------------------------------------------

I still remember the sound of my heart beating deep inside my skull, the painful pressure on my ears and the water getting colder. I was sure I was going to drown right there. But I had to push on, my goal was just within my grasp. Even if it meant that I wouldn’t surface. Inside my head, this was one of the most dramatic and heroic things that I have ever done. What people sunbathing on the dock saw was a chubby kid disappearing under the surface of the very still sea for a few seconds and emerging gasping for air, screaming in what should have been triumph but more likely sounded like terror, and clutching something in his fist so tight that it could have been the Holy Grail and not just an exoskeleton of a long gone sea urchin.

The time was sometime in the late 1990s, I was in my very early teens — I could have been at most 13 — and my family rented a house in an otherwise completely unpopulated little bay on the island of Hvar, perhaps one of the most beautiful islands in the world. This was way before Hvar became the tourist staple it is today and even then, we chose the side of the island that’s opposite to where all the tourist stayed. To get from the house to the nearest store you would have to walk up about 100 extremely steep stairs to get to where you parked your car, embark on a 20 minute extremely slow drive through rough gravel, then another 15 minute on asphalt dodging local bus drivers who made it a sport of taking out as many non-local cars by cutting corners and only then would you get to town. But there wasn’t a town. There was a post office, a store, a church, a graveyard and three houses. You think I’m kidding? Here it is, the same town on Google Streetview 25 years later:

I remember the house having a small TV, but no reception, so there was only one thing to do. Spend in in the sea. We had a small concrete dock that dropped off into what seemed the abyss itself. In reality, to a grown person, it was likely some four meters deep. I spent that entire summer practicing holding my breath, trying to reach the bottom. It took me what must have been a month and I managed to dive down by the end of our vacation. My goal was that mythical sea urchin exoskeleton. But it wasn’t just me that was living this life. Pretty much every single kid that spent their summers on the Adriatic coast has had the exact same experience and brought back a long gone sea urchin. We all know now that it’s not OK to take stuff out of the sea, but we also all had that sea urchin on our shelves as a prized possession.

More than 20 years later, a kid born on the island of Brač, just next to Hvar, who grew up in Dalmatia, the United States and settled in Hong Kong, decided it was time to move back home to Brač, so that his kids could have the same childhood we all had growing up here. He also wanted others to experience the same and combined this urge with his passion for watches. The now grown up kid is Mario Jutronić and the result of his childhood inspiration and love for watches is Marnaut, a watch brand designed in Croatia, built in Germany, using a Swiss movement. Marnaut currently makes three variants of its three models and I have them all in for review. But we’re starting with the most classic of them all, the very capable, quite different, diver called Dark Surge.

On the outside, Dark Surge is quite a classic dive watch. It’s quite large in its measurements - 41mm wide, 14.6mm thick and with a 50mm lug-to-lug. It does, however, wear much smaller. But you have to keep one thing in mind - people from the Balkans are quite large people. We usually fall into the top 10 or 15 tallest countries in the world. And this is equally true of Mario as it is for me. So, this watch looks just at home on my 21cm/8.2 inch wrist. Mario takes this into account when fitting the watch with a black tropic strap, as it is perhaps the longest rubber strap I have ever seen fitted to a brand new watch - I can comfortably wear it with four holes left on the strap, but Mario mentioned that he has gotten some questions as to what’s up with the strap, why is it so long. On the right side of the case you’ll find a medium sized screw-down crown with no crown guards, and out back is a brushed caseback with a raised Marnaut logo medallion.

You can get the Dark Surge in three variants. All three have a unidirectional 120 click bezel on top, but the case and bezel vary in materials. There’s the Dark Surge 300T, perhaps my favorite, which comes with a steel case and a black ceramic insert on the bezel; the Dark Surge  300S comes in a stainless steel case and a fully steel bezel; while the Dark Surge 300B gets a an all black PVD coat on both the case and the bezel, with a black ceramic insert on the bezel. All three bezel variants get fully graduated bezels but, in a somewhat curveball move, omits any numerals on the bezel. Some might balk at the fact that a fully capable dive watch — 300 meters of water resistance — doesn’t have any numbers on the bezel, but let’s be honest: dive watches haven’t actually been dive watches for decades. Sure, a select few old school maniacs will still dive with their watches and tables, but this is not a watch for them. I use timing bezels a lot, mostly when cooking, and I found it quite easy to use even without any numerals. But that’s on dry land and without any stress, I assume the situation might be different underwater.

Then, there are the dials. While one of the Marnaut models offers a white dial variant (more on that in a few weeks), most of them are black. And when I say black, I mean pitch black. A silky black of the sea at night. That’s because they are covered with black enamel, for that enhanced richness. But many dials have black enamel on them. What makes a Marnaut special is the 34 applied circle indices that radiate from the centre. And this is what brings us back to the start of our story. It’s these indices that are instantly recognisable to every single person who has ever dove for a sea urchin exoskeleton, as they mimic the holes on the exoskeleton that’s on my shelf right now. The dial is rounded out with four prominent numerals at the 3, 6, 9 and 12 o’clock positions, as well as elongated pill-shaped applied markers for the rest of the hours. The hands are quite traditional broad arrow style with just a hint of modernity, polished and filled with lume. The seconds hand has a lumed pip near the top. In fact, everything is drenched in lume here. Marnaut uses SuperLumiNova C3 lume and it’s on the hands, the numerals, indices, as well as the applied indices on the rest of the dial.

Inside, a very well known movement, the Sellita SW200-1b. You know it for being an ETA 2824 clone that’s pretty ubiquitous in the indie and micro brand scene. Most brands use it because it’s a well known architecture that watchmakers know how to work on, it’s robust, and works well most of the time. It beats at 4Hz and has a 41 hour power reserve. It also has the same issues you would find on the SW200 with other brands, and these include a bit of rough operation when manually winding and a slight reduction in precision when you’re setting the time. But these factors are different from movement to movement, and the vast majority are just fine.

The strap, like I mentioned, is not particularly special — a 20mm wide black rubber tropic strap — but what does stand out is its extraordinary length. That’s pretty great. It closes with a pin closure that’s signed with the Marnaut logo.

Now, aside from the nostalgia factor, which I cannot influence at all, the Marnaut Dark Surge is a really nice watch. It’s well built, capable, I think it’s pretty handsome, and it’s actually priced quite well. Over the last several years, SW200 indie and micro brand watches under €1,000 were all over the place. You would would have been hard pressed to find more than a handful that sells for more than €1,000. Now, it’s the other way around. The Dark Surge (and even more so the other two Marnaut models) keeps price rather sane — regardless of the variant of the Dark Surge you get, it will set you back €749. Quite reasonable, especially if its a watch that appeals to your nostalgia. If you get it, you get it. If you don’t, it’s still a pretty awesome watch. You can see more of them on the Marnaut website.

-Vuk