Wearing a $20,000 watch with a white strap onboard a Great Lakes wreck diving charter is inviting ridicule. St. Tropez, maybe; the North Shore of Lake Superior, not so much. Here, grizzled cold-water diving veterans wear battered Citizens, if any watch at all, in addition to bulky dive computers. But duty called, and I strapped the Linde Werdelin Oktopus MoonLite ($20,000, limited to 59 pieces) over my drysuit cuff, clipped on the Reef digital dive module and waddled to the back of the boat. Drysuit diving requires wearing a lot of weight in order to counteract the suit’s buoyancy, so in addition to my two air tanks, I was also wearing 30 pounds of lead in my belt. And 2.2 ounces on my left wrist.
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The MoonLite is the latest addition to Linde Werdelin’s Oktopus dive watch series, and its name makes its most important feature clear. Its 23-jewel self-winding movement features an in-house developed complication that displays the phases of the moon via a rotating disc visible through an aperture in the open-worked dial. Moonphase complications are quaintly nostalgic and nothing new, typically found on complicated dress watches. Linde Werdelin likes to say that its inclusion on a dive watch helps its owner determine tides and best times of the month to see whale sharks or sea turtle hatches — but let’s face it, for most it’s just a cool novelty. In this case, that novelty is made extra cool by the photorealistic moon phases printed on the disc (which are read via the + and – days indicator along the bottom). Instead of little moon slivers that look right out of a Victorian-era children’s book, those on the MoonLite are incredibly detailed, showing the Sea of Tranquility and the Ocean of Storms. At night, these are spectacularly illuminated, as if living up to the watch’s name. But that’s not what the “Lite” in MoonLite is all about.
TICK LIST

Movement
Calibre: LW calibre with in-house complication
Frequency: 28,800vph (4 Hz)
Jewels: 23
Power reserve: 44 hours