Belmont Watches Interview
Prepared May 14, 2026

A watch story that opened a Navy story

The conversation started, naturally enough, with a watch. Thomas Jenkins was sitting with family and the Belmont Watches team, talking through a Doxa SUB 300T Sharkhunter that had surfaced from his years in the Navy. At first, it sounded like the kind of vintage-watch mystery collectors love: an old professional diver's watch, a bracelet with its own odd history, a bezel whose paint had faded with time, and a personal serial number Jenkins had once engraved into his gear because that was simply what practical divers did.

Then the story got bigger. Jenkins explained that the Doxa was not merely something he came about randomly. It had been available at the Navy Exchange while he was at Point Loma. For collectors, that detail matters. For Jenkins, it was more straightforward. He had been issued a Rolex beforehand, but, as he put it with the dry humor that kept surfacing throughout the interview, the Rolex 'doesn't keep good time anyway.' He traded it in and ended up with the Doxa SUB 300T Sharkhunter ‘US Divers Aqua Lung’.

The watch was a working object, not a museum piece. It was used, knocked around, worn hard, and treated like a tool. When asked about the decompression bezel, Jenkins did not romanticize it. He remembered it less as a timing instrument for decompression and more as a practical way to track how long a bottle might last. In his world, watches were not props. They were part of the job.

Thomas Jenkin’s Doxa SUB 300T Sharkhunter ‘US Divers Aqua Lung’

Why Jenkins became a diver

Jenkins traced his interest in diving back to high school, when he read about Tom Eadie, the famed Navy diver and Medal of Honor recipient. The appeal was simple and durable: 'It just looked like a good adventure.'

He was already comfortable in the water. Jenkins swam in high school and played water polo, which meant long stretches of treading water before the Navy ever asked him to do it professionally. He also played football, ran track, and stayed active in the way mid-century athletes often did: one season folded into the next. Diving was not a random turn. It fit a person who was already drawn to water, endurance, and the kind of work that punished hesitation.

There was no hint of grandstanding in the way he described it. Becoming a diver was not framed as destiny. It was a choice that made sense to him, then kept making sense once the work became difficult.

Learning to work where you could not see your own hand

A recurring theme in Jenkins's memories was visibility, or the total absence of it. Much of his training took place in the Anacostia River. Once below the surface, he said, you could put your hand on your faceplate and still not see it. The silt blocked the light completely.

That kind of water teaches a diver different habits. It strips away the visual drama people imagine when they think of diving and replaces it with touch, procedure, trust, and repetition. It also explains why Jenkins spoke about zero visibility with such calm. It was not exotic to him. It was part of the training pipeline.

When the Navy later moved diving school operations to clearer water, Jenkins suggested that new divers would still need to be put in conditions where they could not see at all. Clear water can teach confidence. Black water teaches discipline.

No lucky charms, just the work

Asked whether he had any superstitions before getting in the water, Jenkins gave the simplest possible answer: no. There was no ritual, no lucky object, no private ceremony before a dive. You got in and did the work.

That lack of theatrics ran through the entire interview. Even when describing dangerous operations, Jenkins did not inflate the drama. The danger was obvious enough. What mattered was whether the job got done, whether the gear worked, whether the line held, whether the diver beside you could keep his head.

Thomas Jenkin’s Doxa SUB 300T Sharkhunter ‘US Divers Aqua Lung’

'You pick a diving partner,' he said. His own partner was a tall North Carolina diver nicknamed Woody. Jenkins joked that Woody was not as skilled as he was, but the larger point was serious: in the water, your partner mattered. Skill mattered. Temperament mattered. Trust mattered.

The 1965 Rowland Cave rescue

The most gripping part of the interview centered on the Rowland Cave rescue in Arkansas. Jenkins remembered getting the call, gathering air and equipment, and heading toward a flooded cave system where four men were trapped. The town nearby, he recalled, was small enough to be defined by a general store and a single telephone. Reporters later lined up there to file their stories.

The conditions were brutal. The cave was tied to a larger regional system that flooded due to intense, heavy rainfall that caused water levels to rise rapidly. Time mattered because more water could change the cave's behavior and trap the men further. None of the stranded men had used scuba before. Jenkins and the other divers had to bring them out through flooded passages using a bottom line and simple instructions: hold on, do not panic, and let the divers move you.

Jenkins described choosing the first man to bring out based on who seemed most likely to stay composed. He put the man's face in the water, let him take a few breaths from the scuba system, and watched for panic. There was not much air to spare. The test was brief because it had to be.

One of the rescued men was large and powerfully built, the kind of person who could overpower a diver if panic took over in a tunnel. Jenkins and Master Diver Lyle Thomas understood the risk without needing to say much. If the man went berserk underwater, Jenkins said, they would have had to back off. They could try to treat a drowning victim after the fact; they could not help anyone if a panicked man drowned one of the rescuers too.

The rescue succeeded, but the day carried a loss. Thomas, who had made multiple dives, later said he was not feeling well and stopped diving. Jenkins remembered accepting that without interrogation. “If a diver says he is not feeling good, you believe him”. Thomas later collapsed and died of heart failure. Jenkins's telling did not turn that into a spectacle. It remained what it was: a successful rescue marked by a fatal cost.

The tools, the gear, and the habit of making things last

The interview moved easily from watches to gear: regulators, bottles, hard hats, belts, bags, patches, plaques, and the heavy bronze and brass objects that collect around a life spent in and around Navy diving. Jenkins's family described finding items in the garage and around the house, each with its own connection to a unit, a dive, a school, or a stage of his career.

The equipment sounded rugged and imperfect. Some of the old regulators were so obsolete that a modern shop suggested putting one in a museum. Another could still be revived with a new diaphragm. An old air vest worked less like a modern buoyancy compensator and more like a one-way ticket to the surface. The tools were serious, but they were not always forgiving.

That practicality extended to how Jenkins marked his belongings. He engraved valuables with identifying numbers because gear disappeared, gear got mixed, and gear mattered. In the interview, Jenkins explained how he originally would engrave his social security number and later on engraving his driver's license number on items became a practical lesson. Make it easy for the police to connect recovered property to its owner. His Doxa SUB 300T has his social security number engraved between the lugs at 6, and his last name at 12.

Jenkin’s engraving on Doxa SUB 300T Sharkhunter ‘US Divers Aqua Lung’

From SeaLab to deep saturation work

Jenkins was also connected to the world of experimental and saturation diving. The interview touched on the Experimental Diving Unit, the SeaLab program, and the deep saturation efforts that pushed divers and equipment into new territory. He spoke of gas mixes, pressure, capsules, and the way oxygen had to be managed as depth increased.

He did not present the work as glamorous. The tone was closer to engineering under pressure. The deeper divers went, the more the gas mix mattered. The more complex the operation, the more important it became to understand what the body, the equipment, and the team could tolerate. In hindsight, the family described Jenkins and his peers as guinea pigs for modern diving. Jenkins accepted the idea without making much of it.

After the Navy, he worked in commercial diving support, including work connected to offshore oil operations. By then, his role had shifted from being the man underwater to directing and supporting divers from above. It was a different stage of the same life: still technical, still dangerous, still dependent on calm communication when things went wrong.

Plaque of Recognition for being part of “Worlds Deepest Open Sea Saturation Diver”

Why the watch matters

For Belmont Watches, the Doxa was the spark. It connected a modern collector's question to a living diver's memory. Were Doxa watches a key tool to the U.S. Navy divers? In Jenkins's case, the answer from the man who wore it was yes. It had been acquired in Point Loma after he requested it and forfeited one of his issued Rolex Submariners.

But the larger value of the interview is not only the watch provenance. It is the way the watch gives shape to a working life. The faded bezel, the worn case, the bracelet, the engraving, and the stories around it all point to the same truth: this was not an accessory chasing the look of danger. It belonged to someone who spent years doing dangerous work without making a performance of it.

Thomas Jenkin’s Doxa SUB 300T Sharkhunter ‘US Divers Aqua Lung’

At the end of the conversation, Jenkins put the watch back on for a photograph. The time was correct, which shows the robustness. The object had outlived the job it was issued for. It had become evidence, heirloom, artifact, and story prompt all at once. For collectors, that is the good stuff. For Jenkins, it was just his watch.

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Since this interview, we were saddened to learn that Thomas Jenkins passed away on April 11, 2026.

That makes this conversation feel even more meaningful. What began as a discussion about a Doxa watch became something much bigger: a chance to sit with a man who had lived through an extraordinary chapter of diving history and hear those stories in his own words.

We feel incredibly fortunate to have spent that time with him, to handle the watch he wore, and to hear firsthand about his years as a U.S. Navy diver, his work in experimental diving, and the Rowland Cave rescue. Stories like his are easy to lose if no one takes the time to ask, listen, and preserve them.

We are grateful to Thomas Jenkins and his family for sharing his time, his memories, and a remarkable piece of dive watch history with us.

 

Thomas Jenkin’s Doxa SUB 300T Sharkhunter ‘US Divers Aqua Lung’

Plaque of Recognition for being part of “Worlds Deepest Open Sea Saturation Diver”

Thomas Jenkin’s Doxa SUB 300T Sharkhunter ‘US Divers Aqua Lung’

Thomas Jenkin’s Doxa SUB 300T Sharkhunter ‘US Divers Aqua Lung’

Thomas Jenkin’s Doxa SUB 300T Sharkhunter ‘US Divers Aqua Lung’