I recently went to La Chaux-de-Fonds to visit Corum’s museum and workshops. Once a week the Neuchâtel tourist board organises a factory tour, an extremely rare event in the watch industry, and one that should be of interest to the general public as well as watch enthusiasts. Corum Debutante Watch Replica had agreed that at the end of the visit, I’d be able to take a watch home with me, to try out for a week. I was lucky enough to be able to take my pick, and the choice proved rather more difficult to make than I expected. I hesitated between the Miss Golden Bridge, one of the watchmaker’s most iconic timepieces, characterised by its linear baguette-shaped movement, and the famous Bubble with its distinctive steeply domed sapphire crystal. I finally settled on the Bubble, whose quirkiness appealed to me.
When it first came out in 2000, the Bubble landed in the watchmaking landscape like a UFO; no one knew what to make of its unusual shape and extravagant size. In 2015, after a 10-year hiatus (2005–2015), the watch reappeared in the Corum Nautical Watch Replica catalogue under a plethora of new references.
The version I chose, the Bubble Joker, was unveiled at Baselworld this year alongside five other models on the theme of games of chance. The curvaceous profile of the watch contributes to its generous measurements: a depth of 18.5 mm, including the domed glass, and a diameter of 47 mm. To be perfectly honest, I initially felt rather ambivalent about these… impressive proportions. And yet, once it was on, the watch didn’t look too big, or out of place on a woman’s wrist. My conclusion was that its soft, rounded lines made it less unwieldy than its vital statistics would suggest. In addition, the black PVD-treated stainless steel case and short curved lugs make it supremely comfortable to wear. The thick sapphire crystal acts as a magnifying glass, enlarging and deforming the appearance of the dial as you move your wrist, making it endlessly fascinating to look at throughout the day.
We really surfaced the Seafender versions of this Admiral’s Cup watches when the Seafender 47 Tourbillon GMT was released in 2011. At 47mm wide, Corum decided it was fitting at the yacht watch collection to produce an aluminum-cased tourbillon. There was also an 18k red gold version. While those Seafender Tourbillons are admittedly interesting, I simply find no company putting them inside of Admiral’s Cup-style instances. It is not an issue of good or bad even though it is not for me, it is more a thing than it spins the DNA of the Admiral’s Cup collection so much it has all but lost any meaning.On paper, the Corum Admiral’s Cup Chronograph Tourbillon 47 Seafender sounds like a worthy thought. It has a lot of interesting features and slick materials like the sum of its parts could actually be tremendously provocative. Instead, we’ve got a watch built such as a Cadillac that mated with an Abrams tanks. These worlds of aggressive luxury boating and luxury complications just don’t meld together properly in my eyes.Rather than partner a tourbillon using a GMT complication, this Seafender marries a tourbillon and a chronograph – back with a dial for the date. Powering the opinion is your grade CO 398 automatic that’s fairly nice. If you remember what I said about the first Corum Seafender watch it had been that the motion view looked better than the dial. The caliber CO 398 is infrequent, being an automatic for a tourbillon, and on top of that, it is a tourbillon that works in 4 Hz. The 60 second chronograph is column-wheel established, and the dial includes a wonderful window to the tourbillon (with a Corum key logo on it). This dial is a whole lot more written than the Seafender GMT, but that variant with the small round-cut diamonds actually from the sub dials simply doesn’t do it for me. Allow me to ask you, while I really do feel there’s a location for diamonds on an Admiral’s Cup situation (especially baguette-cut ones)… are they really helping anyone by being on the dial like this?
Under the dome, the Bubble is driven by an automatic movement. The brand name is engraved on the rotor, which is visible through the sapphire case back. And finally, the Swiss made movement provides the traditional 42-hour power reserve.