Model History
Presented in the late 1960s, the Regate (French for "regatta") was designed to answer a very specific need in competitive sailing: precisely managing the countdown that precedes the start of a race, traditionally marked by signals at fixed intervals (often 5 minutes) before the actual starting gun. Unlike the Deepstar and Benthos dive watches, the Regate represents Aquastar's "land and surface-sea" soul, dedicated to those who steer the boat rather than those who dive.
The heart of the model is its bezel with a dual 5-minute interval display, designed to be set and read quickly by the helmsman during the approach to the starting line — a task requiring the same immediate, unambiguous reading that the brand's dive bezels offer divers, applied here to the context of sailing competition.
The Regate anticipates, with still-mechanical solutions, the entire "Regatta" line Aquastar would later develop: from 1984 to 2020 the brand indeed directed most of its production toward digital instruments dedicated to the regatta countdown (the Regatta 2000 series), a sign of how central this niche remained to the house's identity throughout its history.
Technical Specifications
Main Executions
The 5-minute-interval countdown before a regatta isn't an arbitrary convention: it replicates the official audible and visual approach-to-start signals used in competitive sailing, which the Regate lets a sailor follow precisely straight from the wrist instead of relying solely on external signals from the race committee.