Profile
Brock Stevens
The deeper we go into studying the backgrounds and aspirations and sensibilities of watch folks, the broader our perspective on watches becomes and the clearer we see the multilateral power they carry for us. We are all here because we love these little machines, what they mean and represent, and what they can say about who we are. Clearly, we don’t collect watches because we need to know what time it is. But we do it in small or large quantities because they tell stories—about us, about others, about current events and past ones—which we are all tied to. They connect us to each other through time and generations and that is why we continue to wear them. Thus, all people we have written profile stories about so far came to horology through a friend, a parent, an uncle or aunt, or a job through a co-worker or because their profession required them to wear a timekeeping device. Or because they chose to have a back-up piece of equipment or a talisman which carries the scratches and marks of the stories they are building everyday.
All profile stories feel special to write but this one does in particular. The subject of today’s article is someone I met randomly at a watch fair last Fall, even though I was following him on Instagram before that and for a long time. I knew him through one career he had and through the underwater photography work he does. At this event, I learned that he did a collaboration with French watchmaker Jacques Bianchi, the JB300 Profonde, which stole the show for me even though there were over 140 brands exhibiting thousands of watches. What this watch had, which others didn’t, was a distinct purpose-driven design and suite of mechanical properties only an experienced professional diver could have added to a dive watch. I had a I-met-a-celibrity-kind-of moment meeting this particular individual and today I’m glad to be telling you about his career, horological background, the work he now does for two exceptional watch brands and a nonprofit organization which strives to bring home World War II Missing In Action (MIA) military personnel.
That person is Brock Stevens and you may know him on Instagram as @deepsea.edc.
First Career: U.S. Navy Diver
Many of us who got into horology arrived at it by way of a particular type of timekeeping device because we have a particular affinity for something. RZE’s Travis Tan is a commercial airline pilot and therefore he always had a thing for pilot and traveler’s watches. Formex’s Raphael Granito is into a variety of sports and outdoorsy activities and so he’s drawn to multipurpose sports watches. Today’s hero, Brock Stevens, always had an affinity for water, whether swimming or snorkeling, and he was the kid who held his breath for as long as the possibility could at the deepest end of the pool. In college, he thought about what kind of career he wanted to have and he knew one thing for sure: that he wanted to serve his country by joining the military. Since he was the most comfortable in the water he evidently decided that diving was his calling and he chose to take the challenging physical screening test that triaged those who wanted to join the Navy Diving School. He passed the test, obviously, and had to choose his speciality amongst many others available to him.
He had the choice between trying for the iconic Navy SEALs—which I would have understood he would have opted for—, the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) units or join as a U.S. Navy Diver. He chose to become a Ship Husbandry Specialist which means doing maintenance on surface ships (i.e. Destroyers), aircraft carriers, and submarines, for which he operated from the MARMC Dive Locker in the Mid-Atlantic area out of Norfolk, Virginia. He mostly worked on submarines and his typical work day—which is so much more unconventional that anything I’ve ever experienced—consisted of checking in early at the Dive Locker (where Navy Divers store their equipment and operate from,) board the ship or vessel they would be doing maintenance on, check for safety tags (paper tags apposed to different commands and controls) to ensure that key systems of the vessel are not running for the safety of the divers (for example a ship’s propeller.) Then he gathered his equipment and started a gruesome 12-hour shift operating, mostly for Brock, inside the emptied ballast tanks of submarines.
To penetrate the tanks he first had to dive below the submarines, then switch to working in contained and dry environments, sometimes climbing the sides of the tanks as if he was doing a Jungle Jim 50 feet in the air, for several hours on end. When he worked solely under the water he was typically tethered to the surface by way of an umbilical cord through which he received air and transmitted data about the progress of his mission. As Brock indicated, the job of Navy Divers is challenging and exhausting as they work in shifts of two weeks, everyday with no breaks, 12 hours per day or more, without seeing their families and loved ones. Their job is physically demanding and many leave the Navy after just a few years, which he was tempted to do after having been at his command as a Ship Husbandry Specialist for five and a half years after having gone through a year-long training. Although he was exhausted and wanted to slow down, he nevertheless wanted to continue to serve and therefore stayed on as a Reservist for which he sets time aside on a regular basis.
As a Reservist, he does quarterly exercises where he assists active duty Navy Divers in their work, he dives, and helps around at the Dive Locker. Once a year he is also required to do a two-week training for which he is re-activated for active duty. During those times he his basically back to doing intense shifts because Navy Divers are in short supply but in high demand to provide the required maintenance on the U.S. Navy’s massive fleet. However, now that he is a Reservist he actually has the time to dive for fun (and other reasons) and to see better waters than he did in his five-and-a-half years of full-time service as an active duty Navy Diver. Working mostly in Norfolk, VA, he dove in murky water where he was happy to have six inches to a foot of visibility which indeed doesn’t sound quite fun. Now, as we will soon see, Brock can not only dive in better waters but also enjoy taking his cherished watches diving and has been developing his underwater photography skills and business. (Check out @deepsea.industries for this part of his new professional life.)
Watches As Talismans and Tools
Brock has a very unique relationship and connection to watches through the work he did as a Navy Diver. But he was into horology a long time before joining the Navy, since he was very young, as each and every one of his role models in life—his grandfather, father, and father-in-law—still wear today analog watches. Seeing them sport timekeeping devices everyday weekday for work and on the weekends, scratching them, and indirectly building stories with them—even though perhaps they didn’t see watches as Brock does today—was a revelation to him. However, none of his role models, and him neither, saw horology as a hobby because growing up he certainly couldn’t do so because they were mostly out of his financial reach. But as soon as he could afford to buy watches he did, as he was deeply attracted to the idea that he could wear specific watches for specific occasions, or when he was with specific people, therefore selecting his watches based on the meanings they could hold for him and remind him of events, places, and special connections.
When he was working full-time as a Ship Husbandry Specialist, he bought a Tornek-Rayville TR660 because he was drawn to the history of the dive watches this model was inspired by and to the unique and specific ways in which Bill Yao, founder of MKII Watches and owner of Tornek-Rayville, put it together. First and foremost, Brock was looking for a reliable, legible, and robust dive watch and he wore the TR660 extensively at work and beat the crap out of it—scratching every single square micron of the case and bezel inside submarine’s ballast tanks and against the hulls of all the ships he did maintenance on. Bill Yao was so meticulous in putting the TR660 together that Brock felt he could always count on it even though the watch went through a sort of horological hell. Dive watches therefore became incredibly important to Brock, both professionally and personally, and he made the habit of engraving the case-backs of all of his tool watches. On the case-back of the TR660 for example, he had engraved his Navy Diving School graduation year, rank, and class number.
For any surface-applied work he did on ships, as indicated earlier, Brock was tethered to a console so that his supervisor could monitor how deep he was and how long he had been underwater, and that is how he also received air and communicated with the surface. So he didn’t need a digital dive computer but he always made a point to wear an analog dive watch so that he could keep track of his own time—Brock indicated that supervisors would often tell him he had been working for fewer hours than he actually did, which he could track thanks to the watch he was wearing. He also likes to wear a dive watch in the rare chance that, should the tether be severed, he could switch to scuba mode using his EGS (Emergency Gas Supply) he was carrying on his back and track his own bottom time and manage his own decompression stops. Now that he can scuba dive for fun, he wears both an analog diver and dive computer as he follows the old military adage of “Two is One and One Is None.” And as we’re about to see, analog watches help him take his mind off things.
Second Career: MKII/Tornek-Rayville
The aforementioned Tornek-Rayville TR660 Brock wore extensively as a Ship Husbandry Specialist, is a watch he bought himself before he knew Bill Yao. And as we know, the former was drawn to how the latter went about designing and manufacturing watches to the highest standards. Bill was also quite the fan of Brock’s underwater photography, and the two men started working together on a few projects, Bill enlisting the help of Brock to partake in the design of watches. Thus, the two appeared to be sharing the same core values of precision and craftmanship. Around 2023, Bill asked if Brock would consider doing social media work for his two brands, MKII Watches and Tornek-Rayville, which was perfect timing for our diver friend as he was getting out of active duty for the Navy. Brock wanted to do more and expressed his interest in working full-time for Bill which came to fruition in November of 2024 as Brock became the marketing manager of the two brands. As he puts it, working for Bill Yao is a dream come true and honor as he deeply respects his work ethics.
I asked Brock how he feels about and sees watches, as I always do, and if it changed when he transitioned from being an active duty Navy Diver to working for MKII and Tornek-Rayville. It didn’t. As we already know, he chooses the watches he adds to his collection for their capacity to hold memories, remind him of periods of his life and the people he’s met, and stay grounded. In other words, for their capacity to tell compelling stories. When Brock chose the TR660 he did so not only because it is a robust piece of underwater horology but also because of the vintage Blancpain Fifty Fathoms Bill drew inspiration from, which were pioneers of professional, water-resistant watches, and their connection to the U.S. Navy. As Tornek-Rayville is the name under which Blancpain sold watches in the United States to various branches of U.S. special forces including the Navy SEALs and underwater demolition teams. Therefore, the TR660 is linked to American military history which matters to Brock and which does to Bill too as we’re about to see in an upcoming article about him.
The two men work wonderfully together then as they both share a passion for good tool watches but more importantly, for good story telling. All of MKII and Tornek-Rayville watches are intimately tied to stories of the American military in different theatres of war across the world and across time, for which Bill has always crafted meticulous narratives based on true events which transpire through the way the watches are designed, made, and packaged. He often designs zines to go along the watch and to support the story telling, writes expansive descriptions and design notes, so that the wearer of a MKII/Tornek-Rayville can grasp what happened to the people who wore the originals, understand who they were, where they came from, what they did and what happened to them. And through MKII and TR, Bill and Brock can continue to tell stories that have never been told, which is a luxury in today’s watchmaking industry where mainstream brands repeat the same iconic stories of someone who climbed Mount Everest and come up with lazy narratives to sell watches fast.
More importantly still, working with Bill has taught Brock about a particular way to create watches. One which involves thinking through the tiniest of details with the utmost precision and obsession, whether it be the proportions of a watch, the design of the dials, hands, and cases, where each element was conceived in a specific way for a particular reason, how they come together to create a good watch anyone can rely on at anytime, as Brock did with the TR660. It is also a process through which each element of the story telling is approached with humility and respect, so that the stories of the brave men can be accurately told, so that when one wears a MKII or TR, he or she is wearing a modern piece of history. Creating a watch for them is a lengthy and exhausting process because they do it the right way and with intention, to the point where Bill, again with the TR660, understood how dive watches look and feel different above and below water, even though he himself never dove. Brock indicated that returns are rare with MKII and TR watches for that reason.
His Work with Project Recover
In addition to working for the two brands full-time and being a Navy Reservist, it seems that this wasn’t enough for Brock to do, which is why he joined Project Recover. The latter is a nonprofit organization whose sole mission is to bring back remains of MIAs and POWs* since WWII. Their mission is challenging but extremely important to the families who lost someone during some of humanity’s deadliest conflicts. Brock knew about Project Recover ever since he was in dive school because many Navy Divers work with them on their recovery missions in many places on earth. He joined as soon as he left active duty in November of 2024 because if there was one thing he wanted to do with his skills, it was to bring home MIAs and POWs because to him, and perhaps to many others as well, they represent the pinnacle of what it is to be a man. Often in their 20s, these men left families, wives, and kids, to fight abroad to protect the United States and so many lost their lives doing so. They showcased immense bravery and courage and lived by a set of values we rarely see nowadays.
*Prisoner of War
Projet Recover runs missions on the ground and below the water and Brock has partaken in dives to search for MIAs remains or anything that could identify them which they could bring back to the U.S. Brock became good friends with the organization’s CEO, Derek Abbey, and founder, Pat Scannon. As we watch nerds are known to be good at, Brock got Derek into watches and suggested that they work on a project together to bring awareness to the organization and raise funds to support its critical mission. With the help of Bill, they decided to center the project around a specific mission, three men from a UDT** detail—who were the precursors to the Navy SEALs—which were captured and executed during World War II, whose traces and remains Project Recover has been looking for for the past 25 years. By creating the Hellion-BAKU collection, MKII helped tell the stories of UDT divers and their work, of Project Recover and its mission to a broadest audience, and to raise funds to support the organisation’s global mission by donating a sizable portion of each sale to Project Recover.
**Underwater Demolition Team.
Conclusion: Doing Even More
Meeting Brock at a watch fair was a very special moment for me because even though I knew little about him back then—other than he was @deepsea.edc, a serious diver, and talented underwater photographer in addition to having an extensive collection of cool dive watches, amongst many other things already—there was something about the way he carries himself that embodied the calm attitude of a confident man who’s out and about in the world to make change for the better and to contribute something singular to our history. I didn’t know about the details of his career as an active duty Navy Diver; I had no idea that he was the Marketing Manager of two of my all-time favorite watch brands—Bill Yao’s MKII and Tornek-Rayville—; that he was a member of Project Recover (which I discovered through MKII’s release of the Hellion-BAKU,) in addition to—as all what precedes this sentence didn’t seem to be enough for him—someone who works freelance with other brands to design thoughtful limited editions akin to the Jacques Bianchi JB300 Profonde.
Yes, that is quite a lot of things for a single man to do indeed and what I saw in him are the same values and courage he sees in MIAs and POWs, so it makes sense that Brock does the work he does with so much dedication and professionalism. I met one of my few heroes last year and it was a privilege to interview him to write this profile story about the man, and now, the legend of Brock Stevens.
Thank you for reading.