It’s coming up on five years since Ryan Gosling signed on with TAG Heuer as the brand’s Hollywood ambassador-in-chief, and in that time, we’ve seen him wear just about every cool and notable watch in its expansive modern oeuvre, and a few choice vintage pieces, as well. But for serious Heuer nerds, none of these quite compares to the timepiece he’s been wearing all week at the international premieres of his new sci-fi action flick, Project Hail Mary.

If you’ve been down the Heuer rabbit hole, then you know that in the late 1940s, Abercrombie & Fitch—then a respected outdoor retailer and a seller of Heuer watches—approached the Swiss watchmaker to design a timepiece with a tide indicator based on solunar theory, which tracks the position of the Sun, Moon, and tides in order to determine the best times for hunting and fishing. A young Jack Heuer then worked with his high school physics teacher to develop such a complication, which was fitted to a watch called the Solunar. Though this watch wasn’t a hit, combining it with a chronograph did the trick, and the Abercrombie & Fitch Seafarer—designed and built by Heuer—was born.

Sold by Abercrombie & Fitch, along with Orvis and Heuer, through the 1970s, the Seafarer underwent numerous evolutions before its eventual retirement. Many years later, in 2024, Heuer released a limited re-edition of its beloved tide-tracking watch with Hodinkee. Housed in a 42mm version of the brand’s modern Carrera “Glassbox” case, it looked somewhat like a mashup of an early-1970s Orvis Solunagraph and an early-2020s Carrera—only this version was fully automatic and boasted an internal 60-minute scale around the dial flange. Most crucially, however, was the tide indicator in all its colorful glory at 9 o’clock, and adjusted via a dedicated pusher built into the case.

Following the success of this limited edition, TAG Heuer brought a non-limited version of the TAG Heuer Chronograph Seafarer into its permanent collection earlier this year. In the new variant, the black dial of the Hodinkee watch has been swapped for a cream-colored dial with gold-tone applied indices, while the tide indicator and 30-minute register feature mint-blue accents reminiscent of vintage Seafarer.

The new Seafarer stands out in TAG Heuer’s expansive collection for the uniqueness of its signature complication, the collaborative story of its original design, and the marriage of American retail and Swiss ingenuity that brought it into being. Fortunately for vintage watch geeks like us, it’s one of many delightful vintage gems to be found in the brand’s archives. Given his penchant for these archival editions, we’ll have our eyes on Gosling’s wrist for the next one.