Tracks on map: check-ins create a parallel route

I'm sailing at the moment and my Inreach messenger is logging my position every hour. At the same time, I'm trying to send check-in messages (started a leg, all ok and ended a leg of the trip) to enrich my communications with the family. Strangely enough, my map (shareable link) shows 2 separate tracks instead of enriching the only one with additional information. This blows my mind. Until recently I was using Spot devices and they log continuously - only some dots on the route have extra information on them where I added some texts.

  • The map pages (at explore.garmin.com and MapShare) are notorious for various kinds of merging failures. Normally, the issue is with the "sent points" (the ones delivered via Iridium) and the "logged points" (the ones that don't show up until you sync). I have never seen a situation where the problem arises because of messages. OTOH, there have been forum reports of the Messenger app showing the position of the PHONE instead of the position of the device (and it was when sailing).

    Before thinking about that, though - are you sure it's not the logged "track" which you are seeing?

  • The pink outline shows my automatically logged points. The pure blue is only comprised of points which were sent with check-in messages. An I have no idea what that dark blue 'wheel' dot means

  • Typically that would be a position report. If somebody requests your position from MapShare (and, by some miracle, eventually receives a response from your device), the position of the response would be that circled "star".

    You might clicking on the circled points to see the date/time of each. Typically, the orange outline highlights the track you selected in the left sidebar on the page. The "non-highlighted" ones are other track(s). In this case, it would be interesting to know if the times indicate that these are really the same track, or different ones.

    Free-form messages would appear (last time I looked) as a little "cartoon balloon" that looks a bit like a message. I don't know about check-in messages. Would have expected them to appear as messages, NOT points. But maybe not. This might be another thing that would show up in the pop-up when you click the circle...

  • Message bubbles appear on Explore on a smaller route. All the dots are on the route, but because I have hourly tracking - there are long intervals between dots, so it does not look smooth. And then an additional track made of messages has even longer spans which are connected together into a very ugly incorrect track