Vostok Amphibia SE 020B37

The Vostok Amphibia SE 020B37 appeared on Meranom’s website in the summer of 2019. I decided to add this to the collection mainly because I hadn’t bought anything new for a while (I was getting withdrawal symptons!) and also because I realised that, apart from the Vostok Sailboat 710, I didn’t actually have an Amphibia with white dial in my collection.

It seems that the Amphibia 020 case has only ever been offered as a special edition from Meranom. However, I am pretty sure that it is the same watch case as the Vostok Komandirksie 02. They look the same, but I don’t have a Komandirksie 02 to compare the watches in the flesh. As far as I know, there has never been an Amphibia Classic 020. At time of writing (October 2019), there have been at least 19 different SE 020s with various dial, hands, strap and finish combinations. The other SE 020s seem to mainly be a combination of two or three different dial designs in black or white. Unusually for a Vostok Amphibia, some of the SE 020s had a unidirectional bezel, like the fantastic yellow-faced Vostok Amphibia SE 020B33. The movement is the automatic 31 jewel Vostok 2415.01.

The Vostok 020 case is what I describe as a fairly traditionally shaped diver’s watch. I am not going to go into too much detail describing the watch case, I am afraid this is more of a “show and tell”. After all, I have described the Amphibia SE 020 watch case here relatively recently. The case has an attractive brushed finish and the case back is the CCCP Gagarin Cosmonaut design. The crown is stainless steel and signed with the Vostok “B” logo. The bidirectional bezel is stainless steel with an orange bezel insert which has a nice big lume pip at the zero marker.

The dial for the Vostok Amphibia SE 020B37 is the classic Vostok “sniper” dial in a nice bright white colour. The “sniper” dial design is one of Vostok’s classic dials and it can be found in many sorts of watches. The Vostok Amphibia SE 090B38 Antimagnetic has the same dial design for example. The markers on the dial have a gun metal finish (they look black to me) and match the finish of the hands. There is a silver chapter ring. Around the outside of the dial are simple 60 minute / second markers. There are block type hour markers at 12, 3, 6, and 9 whilst the remaining hour markers are numerals. There is a small inverted triangle under the 12 o’clock marker. Outside of the hour markers are 12 lume pips. Both the watch indices and the lume pips are nicely raised, giving a little bit of extra relief to the dial. From top to bottom the dial features the cyrillic words Boctok, antimagnetic, 31 jewels, automatic, 200m and, around the bottom, Made In Russia. The white watch face makes this a nice and clear dial to read.

The hands are what I would describe as a tapered sword shape. These have been used before in various SE models, like the Vostok Amphibia 120360NK SE. The seconds hand looks like a normal Amphibia seconds but it is actually bit longer than normal and reaches smartly to the outside of the dial making the minute / seconds markers around the outside of the dial nice and easy to read. These improved seconds hands seem to be used on most of the SEs recently. As mentioned above, all of hands have a gun metal finish. They centre of the hour and minute hands has a good amount of lume and the lume seems pretty good.

Lastly, the strap. It is one of Vostok’s silicon diver’s straps with the “anti-dust” treatment. I don’t mind Vostok’s silicon straps, they are pretty comfortable. I quite like the bright orange strap for the summer months, but it is a little bit bright for my liking for day to day. I also find that the lighter coloured silicon straps such as this can start to look pretty dirty and shabby pretty quickly. I already have a Barton Watch Bands canvas khaki strap to put on it. I’ll post a picture when I swap it over.

I like the Vostok Amphibia SE 020B37, it makes a nice bright, summertime watch on the orange strap. However, I do detect a certain amount of recycling of ideas.

Price at purchase was $130.00.