Heuer Solunar 279.603

The first Heuer Solunar 279.603 was presented in 1976 as a wristwatch with an integrated tide indicator. After a short period of 4 years the production came to an end in 1980. The Solunar was particularly popular with sailors, fishermen and hunters. And today this vintage watch is admired by vintage watch collectors for its unique design and rarity.

The Heuer Solunar has two crowns on the right side of the case. The inner bezel can be rotated with the lower crown - more on that later. The upper crown is multifunctional. In the initial position the watch can be wound. In the first crown position the date and the weekday can be set. Forward rotation moves the date disc and the backward rotation the weekday. A pretty impressive feature of this watch is the bilingual weekday disc in English and French. Once you have set the day of the week in the desired language, the following day of the week is automatically displayed in this language. The exact time can be set in the outermost crown position.

The tide is caused by the moon gravitation pull. This force varies due to the earth's rotation about its axis and due to the moon's rotation around the earth. With the help of physics, one can calculate that there are 6 hours between high and low tide and that the time of the high tide moves by 51.5 minutes each day. The days of the week are positioned on the inner bezel of the Heuer Solunar at exactly this interval of approximately 51.5 minutes. Once it's high tide, simply line up the day of the week on the inner bezel with the hour hand, and the watch shows the time of high tide every day for the next two weeks. To read the high and low tide within one day, align the red triangle (high tide) on the outer bezel with the current day of the week on the inner bezel.

The hand set of this particular Heuer Solunar is unusual and very interesting. In most known examples, all three hands are white, with the hour and minute hands provided with tritium lume. As you can see, the Heuer Solunar offered here has slightly different hands. The hour hand is red and matches the red font color on the outer bezel. The minute hand is yellow. Last but not least, the white second hand has tritium lume at its tip. The unusual hand set could be an indication that the hands have been replaced during a service. However, due to the tastefully chosen design, we assume that these hands were a special request of the customer and were fitted with this watch from scratch. We will probably never find out exactly. What remains is a beautiful vintage tool watch of great historical relevance.

The Heuer Solunar is driven by the ETA 2790-1 automatic movement. Like the Solunar, this caliber was only produced for 4 years between 1976 and 1980. The Heuer Solunar 279.603 is a very unusual vintage watch and a proud representative of the 1970s.

Serial number: 328xxx

Int.Exe.: 75750