What Was Your Third Watch? For Me, It Was a Glashutte Original Senator Navigator.

What’s your third watch? It’s an honest question – and one that says a lot about you and your collection.

You see, everyone remembers their first nice watch. Maybe it was a gift. Maybe it was something you got for graduation. But it is a watch you remember. For me, it was a watch I got for graduation from high school. And I will probably never sell it or trade it in.

The second watch, for me it was an Omega Seamaster – the Bond Watch. I can remember buying it at Costco in Atlanta, GA right after I got a promotion at work. It was grey market and had the serial number polished off (what was something they did at the time). It came with a box and manual but no warranty, but I didn’t know any better. I researched that watch in the early days of the Internet and wore it proudly for decades. My guess is that many people have a similar experience with their second watch.

Third watch? That’s something else entirely. A third watch means that this watch thing is real – you’re becoming a Collector. This is not going to be a casual purchase – you’re going to research the hell out of it and get something unique. Distinctive. Special. For me, it was this GO Senator Navigator. (See a gallery of this watch here.)

It had several things I had never seen on a watch. It had a big date, with different complications for each number. Cool. It also had a fly-back seconds hand. That was pretty neat, too. And it was just a really, really good looking and authentic-looking aviation watch.

So with this watch, my 3-watch collection was complete – a two-tone Rolex DateJust, a Seamaster and a Swiss aviation watch. This would keep me happy for almost ten years until I would purchase Watch Number Four and the slide towards a Watch Obsession would take me to today.

By the way, I still have all three of these watches.