News · Spinnaker

Spinnaker hands the Spence 300 dial to a painter for Underwater Dancers

A hand-painted manta ray scene from IFL Watches sits under sapphire in a 300-metre steel diver, with a no-date Miyota 9039 behind it and US$950 on the ticket.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 3 min read · 20 September 2026

• Spinnaker has worked with IFL Watches on a hand-painted manta ray dial for the Spence 300 Automatic, launched around World Manta Ray Day.
• The 40mm steel case carries 300 metres of water resistance and anti-reflective sapphire over a painted underwater scene running turquoise to deep blue.
• It uses the three-hand Miyota 9039 with no date, on a 20mm steel bracelet, and sells for US$950 on Spinnaker's own storefront.

Hand-painted dials have had a strange few years. What began as a genuinely specialised craft, one person and a brush and a lot of ruined attempts, has been diluted by a run of watches where the painting is really a transfer with ambitions, and the word artisanal is doing heavy lifting in the press release. So there is reason to be wary when a brand at the affordable end announces one. Spinnaker has gone ahead anyway, with the Spence 300 Underwater Dancers, made with IFL Watches.

Manta rays, and a dial that refuses to sit still

IFL Watches has built its name turning production watches into hand-painted pieces, and the subject here is the manta ray, timed to arrive around World Manta Ray Day. Divers describe mantas as weightless, and that is the quality Spinnaker says the dial is chasing: not a portrait of a fish but a moment of one moving, wings mid-beat, against blue.

Look closely and there are two rays, one of them turning its pale spotted underside towards you, crossing a scene that runs from turquoise at the surface down through deep blue, with shafts of light coming from above and a band of coral and small fish along a paler seabed. That sense of depth is what separates painting from printing, because a transfer puts everything on one plane and the eye notices even when it cannot say why. Whether it justifies the outlay is a separate question, and I will come to it.

Forty millimetres, and a depth rating that outruns the dial

The case is 40mm across, 11.5mm thick and 48mm from lug to lug, in stainless steel, which is the set of numbers that has quietly become the default for a diver somebody actually intends to wear rather than admire. At 140 grams on the bracelet it has enough heft to sit still on the wrist without becoming a nuisance by the afternoon.

Water resistance is 30 ATM, which is 300 metres, and that is the small joke of the thing. A painted dial under sapphire is the last surface you would want to take to any depth worth the rating, so the Spence 300 is engineered for a dive it will almost certainly never be asked to do. The crystal is sapphire with anti-reflective coating, which matters more than usual here, since the entire point is looking at the dial rather than through a sheet of reflected sky. Above it sits a blue rotating dive bezel with luminous markers, the one part of the watch that behaves like ordinary equipment.

A Miyota, doing exactly what it should

Inside is the Miyota 9039, an automatic beating at 28,800 vibrations per hour on 24 jewels. Spinnaker has specified it in the three-hand configuration, with no date, which is the correct choice and worth saying out loud. A date window punched through this dial would have taken a bite out of whichever manta happened to be swimming at three o'clock, and plenty of brands would have fitted one anyway.

The 9039 is a workhorse rather than a showpiece, and nobody is buying this watch for what is behind the dial. The money has gone into the front of it, which is where the argument for this piece lives or dies.

The bracelet, and the bit most collaborations forget

Spinnaker has fitted a 20mm steel bracelet with a fold-over buckle, a safety lock and a push-button release. None of that is exotic, but a safety lock and a push button on a bracelet at this price is the sort of specification that gets quietly dropped when a brand is concentrating on a licensing deal. It has not been dropped here.

Spinnaker Spence 300 Underwater Dancers pricing and availability

The Spence 300 Automatic IFL Manta Edition, reference SP-5191-11, is US$950 on Spinnaker's own storefront. The brand has not published an Australian price, and it does not state an edition size on the product page.

So, the question I parked earlier. Nine hundred and fifty dollars is a lot for a Miyota-powered diver and roughly nothing for a hand-painted dial, and where you land depends entirely on which of those two sentences you think is the real one. I have decided it is the second. The engineering here is competent and unremarkable, and it was never meant to be otherwise: it is a frame, and a good one, built to hold something that had to be made by hand. Mantas, as it turns out, travel best in a well-made case.