the Patron Saint of Dive Watches

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koimaster
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the Patron Saint of Dive Watches

Post by koimaster » September 15th 2021, 9:30am

Rick Marei has made a profession out of resurrecting once-defunct timepieces.


In the sixties and seventies, Doxa, Aquadive and Aquastar made the kinds of serious watches you’d find for sale in dive shops rather than at jewelers, while Tropic and ISOfrane made waterproof rubber straps that came standard on many such watches. It was a time when sport diving was still young and dangerous, and watches from this era have a special appeal to today’s vintage collectors. After these brands faded into obscurity, Rick Marei brought each back to life, one by one.

Resurrecting defunct dive-watch brands was a natural extension of Marei’s passion as a collector. It all started in the 1990s, when most collectors were hunting for pocket watches — few were interested in the mechanical workhorse timepieces from the 1970s the way he was. Marei became obsessed with recreating a famous Doxa dive watch, the 1969 SUB 300T Conquistador, which was developed with the legendary oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. Its unique design — which includes a bright orange dial for increased underwater legibility — helped it later become a cult classic.


https://www.gearpatrol.com/watches/a365 ... s-profile/



How One of the Most Important Dive Watches of the 1960s Was Revived

We caught up with Rick Marei to pick his brain on how and why he brought back the Aquastar Deepstar.


https://www.gearpatrol.com/watches/a359 ... interview/



Excuse while I vomit.



From: rick marei
Sent: Saturday, 16 February 2019 07:09
To: Mike Horn <[email protected]>
Subject: RE: Shutdown



Hi Mike, Hope all is well at your end,

I sent you so many emails, see one below back in April 2018, the IT guys here tried their best to rescue the forum and the domain, when you emailed me back about your wife's health issues, I backed off, but without access to the DNS of bdwf.net it is impossible, now Alain Rech from WL has been contacting my staff and is speaking in your name (he is on cc). Can you please get back to me to fix the problems, at least give me a sign
Bullshit and doxaboi knew it. Never had contact with anyone other than Mike or the doxaboi. Mike also knew that doxaboi lied about a lot of things including until the end, where the forum was hosted. Mike did not have credentials to the forum anymore, doxaboi did as ad admin.
Please forgive my sparse responses to your generous offers as I value
our BDWF database of many years and need to see how flexible Rick is
on giving up the data.
I've had problems reaching his email used in
correspondence between us when I need access the most - as my time is
greatly limited. I will respond as soon as possible as things between
us get sorted out.

I personally value your many previous offers of help and personally
want to express my gratitude for your continuing unconditional offers
of assistance.

Regards,

Mike Horn
Daegu - Republic of Korea
From Mike Horn to me -
My main goal is still to move BDWF to a more stable server and bring the original BDWF database intact to that new site. This will take Rick's permission and I think I understood his last conversation to me that this would be ok. BUT - he remains fiercely paranoid about my contacts with you or any other relationship to with WLs ...
On 2015-12-06 18:15, Mike Horn wrote:

Alain:

Rick let off some 'steam' when I mentioned W/L - and I was blind
sided. I knew generally about the controversy but never associated it
with you at the time and let it rest. I own a Divingstar GMT purchased
many years ago second hand and quite enjoy it. That's as far as my
association with Doxa as a brand.

I acquired 50% of this forum and paid Randy for it, I hosted it for 10 years now, I really hate to see it disappear , so please help me get the database backed up an restored to a new hardware by making a call to godaddy in order to regain access to the DNS settings of the domain.



Thanks

Rick



From: Mike Horn <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, 5 April 2018 13:10
To: rick marei <[email protected]>
Subject: RE: Shutdown



Rick:



Don't know what else I can send you other than the GoDaddy accct name/number and password ...


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
That is all that was needed by the doxa man to back up the domain. With the information above you can go to the domain, change DNS, move the domain as I have to knownost and cloudflare. Marei is and in his email full of shit. If doxa boi had any real concerns about this he could have logged into the BDWF forum and done a back up to his own computer. On this site we back up to two sources including my own server which does NOT host the forums.


-----Original Message-----
From: rick marei
Sent: Apr 5, 2018 3:38 PM
To: Mike Horn
Subject: RE: Shutdown

Hi Mike, In order to avoid loss of data, I will have to shut down the server today to start a backup, and will restore to www.thewatchofurm.net until we find the DNS account details for the domain bdwf.net (http://www.thewatchofurm.net/ does not exist and the real site is thewatchforum.net which is owned by watchlords)

If you happen to find your credentials, please send them over as soon as you can

thanks

Best regards

Rick
I might add, there was no loss of data at that time. The original BDWF forum was up and running but there were issues with the "server" the troll was using to host the site. I will also say that Mike originally had no idea of the involvement of the troll let alone that the forum was hosted on his white box.


This is the real Doxaboi
"Here are the emails I received from Rick Marei of Doxa and John
Pfeiffer:


Randy, thank you for contacting John and for giving him this
opportunity. John P. forwarded me your email because he has suffered
throughout the past few weeks because of John Vargas's attitude, because
he felt he is responsible for hiring John Vargas and for all the damage
that he caused.

Please let me explain the situation before I proceed with commenting the
thread publicly.

John Vargas is mentally unstable. His injuries have rendered almost all
his vital organs dysfunctional and put him in a long comma, where his
brain has suffered and unfortunately, it was permanently damaged. When
he started to work for DOXA, we found him very pleasant to deal with
until he started building his network of lies. John is a notorious liar
and this is to the most extent, a result of his mental disorder. I never
heard of a person in my entire life who is able to build such a network
of lies around himself and at some time, starts believing them. I have a
list of people with a long list of lies they were told by John, usually
persons, he would call, brothers or friends. All of them are, although
they sometimes find him, a pleasant person to deal with, are sick and
tired of his lies. John is not a bad guy or at least, I assume and hope
he is isn't, but his mental disorder makes it hard to deal with him.
John built his own virtual world and unfortunately, the internet has
given him a good soil to do it.

As the information he posted are mostly untrue. I am tempted to reply to
his thread but I am not sure yet of whether this is the best way to
proceed. I do not know much about your forum and whether the forum
members are willing to listen to the truth and the other side of the
story.

Rick "



"Hi Randy, I have read through the thread again and it contains email
communication between John Vargas and DOXA and slanderous material. If
you have an anti slander policy, I kindly ask you to remove this thread

This correspondence between John and DOXA is not meant for public use
and it is your decision whether you think it is correct to have this
type of personal correspondence on your forum.

Thank you
Rick"
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=19624&p=192695#p192695
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