White Cargo (1988)

Stuart Woods's thriller is copyright 1988 and is read here in the 2009 Harper paperback. Wendell "Cat" Catledge, who made his fortune in electronics with the Cat One printer, is sailing his yacht Catbird toward Panama with his wife Katie and daughter Jinx when a detour toward Colombia's Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta ends in a pirate attack that sends his family and his yacht to the bottom and leaves him alive. (Open Library)

Watches

Rolex watch: Woken at dawn by the yacht hove to, Cat checks the gold-and-steel Rolex Katie and Jinx gave him as a launching present. The attackers take nothing, it seems, but the watch (p. 43). In Santa Marta he spots a boy on a scooter wearing it and tells his companion Bluey that his is a newer quartz Rolex, unlike the mechanical ones the local runners wear, with engraving on the back (pp. 148 to 149). A woman named Garcia brings it to his room; the caseback reads "For Cat and Catbird, with love, Katie & Jinx" (p. 159). The novel does not name the model; a quartz Rolex of the period points to the Oysterquartz, an inference from the description. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Cat glanced at the gold-and-steel Rolex wristwatch Katie and Jinx had given him as a launching present: not quite 6 a.m. (Stuart Woods, White Cargo, scan cataloged as Harper, 2009, p. 28; Internet Archive scan OCR)