Bausele Oceanmoon V Pacific Blue Review

One of the things I find most interesting in starting Hourstriker is getting to know all about brands I was unaware of from my past twenty years of being in the watch industry. Previously all of my attention was spent on the monster brands like Audemars Piguet, IWC, Patek Philippe and the like. Of course I knew about some of the smaller independents out there, but I never really had the time or need to look more into them.

One such brand is the Australian brand of Bausele, which is short for Beyond Australian Elements. Bausele was started by Christophe Hoppe in Sydney in 2011. One of the primary goals of Bausele was to honor and embody the spirit of Australia in a watch brand. Just a quick look through the collections Bausele offers is enough to see the deep connection the watches have to their homeland. Interesting touches such as having crowns filled with sand from Australian beaches is something we love and have never seen before.



Bausele quickly started to grow and they were the first Australian company to present their watches at Baselworld in 2015. 2016 also saw Bausele collaborate with the Sydney Opera House for a special edition watch. The Royal Australian Air Force even commissioned Bausele to create an official watch for their 100th anniversary. More recently Bausele teamed up with the Bathurst 12 Hour race for an official timepiece commemorating the event, with the crown filled with granules from the track which were awarded to the top 12 finishers.

So now that we’re all caught up on the history of Bausele, let’s take a look at the OCEANMOON V Pacific Blue they sent us for review. The OCEANMOON V (OMV) is the fifth in the series of OCEANMOONS and is marketed as the “Disconnected Watch” by Bausele. The model we have is the Pacific Blue whose blue dial is meant to remind you of the shades of the Pacific Ocean stretching along the Australian coastline.



The OCEANMOON V is the largest watch Bausele makes and we thought it would be the best introduction for us since we prefer slightly larger watches. While Bausele offers a range of sub 40 mm watches, the OCEANMOON measures in at a healthy 42 mm in diameter and 49.2 mm lug to lug. The watch is also 14.5 mm thick and weighs in at 137 grams on our scale on the rubber strap.

While personally I prefer lug to lug measurements north of 50 mm, the close to 50 mm lug to lug and thickness of the OCEANMOON V make it feel right at home on my wrist though. The included orange rubber strap grips my wrist well and keeps the watch centered on my wrist. I can’t stand when a watch tends to favor one side of my wrist or the other, which wasn’t an issue I had with the OCEANMOON V.



Instantly the first thing you notice about the OCEANMOON V Pacific Blue is the dial. The stunning blue sunburst dial explodes from a very light blue, nearly white, center out to a deep and rich blue near the internal rotating bezel. The 12, 4 and 8 markers are Arabic numerals, while 3, 6 and 9 are stick indices with the remaining indices being round indices.

For maximum lume, Bausele incorporates a sandwich dial construction on the OCEANMOON V Pacific Blue. The lower dial is covered with intense Super Luminova while the upper dial has cutouts for the numerals and indices. Not only does this design allow maximum lume to shine through, but also gives the dial a very nice 3D effect with extra depth given to the indices. This is very similar to what Panerai does with some of their watches as well.



The dial is rather clean with only the “BAUSELE Australia” text at 12 o’clock and the “OCEANMOON” and “Swiss Made” text at 6 o’clock. The baton style hour and minute hands as well as the tip of the seconds hand are covered with a generous amount of Super Luminova. In all the dial is executed extremely well and the high contrast of the bright blue dial and white markers and hands makes telling the time at a glance a breeze. The sandwich dial also makes sure that you’ll have plenty of lume present to tell the time in dark situations such as diving in low light conditions.

The upper crown of the OCEANMOON V controls the inner bezel which is done in a silvery blue that compliments the dial color nicely. I’ve always liked the idea of an internal bezel and spent a lot of time with them on an older Hamilton Khaki Diver as well as IWC Aquatimers and Royal Oak Offshore Divers. The beauty of the inner bezel is that it eliminates any chance of the bezel being turned by mistake during a dive, which you could imagine would be extremely dangerous while timing a dive.



The crown for the inner bezel is a screw down type and will rotate the bezel in both directions. The action of the bezel feels great and allows accurate setting. When you have the bezel set to the desired position, the crown is true and will not make the bezel jump when being screwed back in.

The brushed stainless steel case compliments the dial nicely, with the color of the inner bezel almost blending into the stainless steel bezel. I typically prefer a brushed finished over polished, especially with a diver’s watch like the OCEANMOON V. The right side of the case also has a black insert where both of the crowns are found. Both crowns are black with the top inner bezel crown having finer grooves than the bottom crown’s larger grooves.



Speaking of the bottom crown, this is where the OCEANMOON V really separates itself from other watches I’ve handled in the past. The top of the crown has a window that displays in contents of the crown, in this case filled with sand from Manly Beach in north Sydney. I’m not sure of a better and more authentic way Bausele could create a link back to its Australian roots than the white sands of an Australian beach. There is enough space left in the crown that the sand will actually shift when you move the watch around. It’s a subtle, but very interesting touch added to the OCEANMOON V.

When you flip the watch over, you are greeted with a solid case back with an image of the full moon over the ocean. Bausele also adds the phase “Keep a piece of Australia with you” to the case back. All of the relevant information about the watch is also displayed here from the one of 100 limited edition, 200 meters of water resistance and its anti-magnetic design.



When it comes to straps, Bausele does something I’ve never seen done before. The OCEANMOON V comes with two straps, one being orange rubber and the other being a black strap made out of upcycled ocean waste. The crazy part is that each strap comes with its own stainless steel deployant clasp. While I love the idea of reusing ocean plastic and even have a few pairs of shoes Adidas collaborated with Parley on that are made out of ocean plastic, I just love my divers on rubber straps. The orange rubber strap really gives the OCEANMOON V a distinctive appearance with its stunning blue dial and bright orange strap. The black strap gives the watch a much more reserved appearance, making it easy to go from a watch you wear to the beach to a watch you can wear out to dinner. Both straps come with a quick release system built in, making strap changes take just a few moments.

The lug width on the OCEANMOON V is 22 mm, meaning the straps are nice and wide, making sure they keep the watch in place. While the rubber strap has a ribbed pattern on the back of the strap that keeps the strap in place, the ocean plastic strap has a red leather backing, achieving the same result. If you’ve read any of my reviews, you know how much I dislike standard buckles and prefer deployant clasps. I’ve even ended up selling watches I like because there is no deployant solution for them either OEM or aftermarket. Bausele uses a double butterfly style brushed stainless steel deployant clasp on the OCEANMOON V. Besides pretty much making the chances of dropping the watch while putting it on zero, the deployant clasp is also very comfortable never digging into your skin.



The heart of the OCEANMOON V is the tried and true Swiss made Sellita SW200 movement featuring 38 hours of power reserve beating at 28,800 vph. The SW200 does have a date function, but the OCEANMOON V does not have a date display and I’m happy to report that there is no phantom date setting from the crown in position one. After the crown in unscrewed, you can manually wind it, the next and only position is your time setting. I have experienced a lot of watches that use similar movements where the no date is an afterthought and the first crown position lets your set a non-existent date… not here though.

The Swiss movement is also a clue to the OCEANMOON V’s duality… this watch embodies Australia while being engineered and assembled in Switzerland. The finishing of the watch is as good as most watches you see from Swiss brands at or even double that of the OCEANMOON V’s price of $1,300. The watch also performed on par if not better than other Swiss watches we’ve had in, running a very respectable + 7 seconds a day on our timegrapher.



We’ve had the OCEANMOON V Pacific Blue for a few weeks, so I’ve had multiple chances to wear it without it being on more of a forced timeframe like some of the watches we get in on loan. I do wish that we were already in summer, so that I could have had some chances to get it wet in the pool or the lake. For the most part the OCEANMOON V has been tasked with running errands much beneath its 200 meter water resistance and anti-magnetic Faraday cage would be up to.

For the longest time I’ve been very steadfast in my preference of case materials for a watch. Since I like larger watches, I tend to opt for lightweight materials like titanium, ceramic or carbon. Besides my wife’s 16622 Yacht-Master, we don’t personally own a stainless steel watch. I always thought if there was an option of titanium in a similar watch, why not go for that. After wearing a lot more stainless steel watches while doing reviews recently, I’ve kind of got over this way of thinking. When you aren’t comparing watches on a bracelet, for the most part the weight stainless steel adds over titanium isn’t felt too much on the wrist.



This has been the case with the OCEANMOON V… during my time wearing the watch I have yet to be hit with any wrist fatigue. The brushed finish of the case also is more in line with titanium, which is just a hue I’m more used to and prefer. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been sticking mostly with the rubber strap while wearing the watch. The rubber strap is super flexible and required zero break in. I feel the strap made from ocean plastic is a bit stiffer, so some break in will probably be required.

The crystal on the OCEANMOON V Pacific Blue is a sapphire crystal with five layers of anti-reflective coating. Not only is the sapphire crystal clear, but it really cuts down the reflections to near zero, making it super easy to tell the time in most lighting conditions, even the harshest sun. This of course also shows off the amazing hues of the blue dial. The overly large Arabic numerals also make telling time so easy, as does the contrast between the dial color and the white Super Luminova.



Naturally the combination of the bright orange rubber strap and the super bright sunburst blue dial has got the watch noticed a few times while wearing it. It’s fun to tell people about the watch and Bausele as a brand, since most people are not familiar with Australian watch brands. What seems to always steal the show when showing people the OCEANMOON V is the sand included in the crown. I can’t really think of another watch that has done something similar, maybe the King Power Hublot did for Manchester United where the used grass from Old Trafford to formed the indices.

In all, I love what Bausele has done with the OCEANMOON V Pacific Blue. For a reasonable price of $1,300 Bausele has a Swiss made watch that embraces all the seriousness and heritage that goes along with that and adds in some flairs and touches of Australia. The color of the dial along with the sandwich dial construction is a very nice combination. Also the use of mixed indices including Arabic Numbers and stick and dot indices is unique, as is the use of 12, 4, and 8 as the chosen Arabic Numerals.



I also like how Bausele included two drastically different straps that each has their own deployant clasp. Each strap truly gives the watch a totally different look and feel. The 200 meters of water resistance is more than enough to satisfy any recreational diver as well.

I have no problems recommending the Bausele OCEANMOON V Pacific Blue to anyone looking for something different in the divers watch market. There are countless watches that mimic the look of the Submariner or the vintage diver vibes of the Fifty Fathoms. The OCEANMOON V really doesn’t copy anything from any other diver’s playbook and is its own unique watch.



We’d really like to thank Christo and Sam over at Bausele for sending us this OCEANMOON V Pacific Blue and can’t wait to see what they’ll send us next!

If you’d like to know about Bausele and the OCEANMOON V Pacific Blue, please take some time to visit their site: Bausele

Technical Specifications

Reference Number: Pacific Blue

Retail Price: $1,300

Case Size: 42 mm

Lug to Lug: 49.2 mm

Thickness: 14.5 mm

Weight: 137 grams

Case Material: Stainless Steel 316L

Bezel: Inner Bi-Directional Rotating

Strap: Orange Rubber and Black Ocean Plastic both with Deployant Clasps

Movement: Sellita SW200

Functions: Hours, Minutes, Seconds

Power Reserve: 38 Hours