I have managed to limit my Seiko purchasing during the summer and fall to about one watch a month, which is excellent for me after an average of two a week for about five years. Unfortunately, this has been replaced but too many purchases of non-Seiko watches but more about that in later posts.
Before the summer, I made a shortlist of a few watches that still were not in my collection (hard to believe, I know). One of these watches was the Champion Flying Fish. The watch is a standard Champion with the basic 17j caliber but with a fancy dial and a special caseback. It was sold only for a short period in 1962 as a upscale Champion priced at JPY 5200 instead of the standard JPY 4700 for a normal 17j Champion. We are however still in the low end of the Seiko scale where you have watches such as the Seikomatic at twice the price.
I did not really think I would find a Flying Fish very soon as they usually come up for sale once very two years or so. A month ago, the below watch turned up. Excellent condition both for the dial and the case back. As lower quality watches, the Fish is often very degraded and not that carefully handled by their previous owners but this was a great example. After a 70 minute fight and lots of overbidding (Japanese auctions extend 5 minutes for high bids at the end so they can drag out a lot), I gave up on this one slightly below JPY 40000 (or about USD 500). At 8 times its original price, it would have been one of the more expensive watches in my collection had I persisted.
Even after that exhausting fight for the first fish, I had not given up completely. As you know, fish seldom travel alone and it sometimes happens in auction that other sellers see a watch selling at a very high price and get the incitement to put similar watches on the market. Last week, the below fish surfaced. Stained dial, worn caseback and not at all in such good shape as the first one but it was still a fish and it would fill the last hole in the collection. In the end, I had to pay far too much for the quality of the watch at almost JPY 25000 but I had my fish in the net and I was a happy camper (fisher ?).
It will be interesting to see how long the Seiko hiatus lasts but presently it seems like a good size for a Seiko collection is about 500 watches.
All pics from sellers.
/ martin
