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Instinct solar surf buying advice

HI,

I have a Fenix 5s plus.

I created my own watch face to get tide info. But at the end I almost prefer a regular surf watch with tides. Less buggy. Until I lost it... so now I am shopping for a replacement.

I am interested in buying the solar surf edition, but I see posts here that worry me a bit.

- Does the watch display the correct tide info? It looks like more than one person have issue with this.

- Does the tide info stay while you go to the beach and surf? Because I see some people saying that without bluetooth that shows "no tide data". Making it pointless. I can't be next to my phone while I am in the water....

- Does the surf app works well and/or does it drain a lot of battery?

Thanks for your help.

0 7030422 over 3 years ago

Hi

As a owner of this watch and an occasional surfer, I can (saddly?) answer these questions.

- Does the watch display the correct tide info? It looks like more than one person have issue with this.
It is reliable enough. If it's off, you can't really tell and it has no practical impact.

- Does the tide info stay while you go to the beach and surf? Because I see some people saying that without bluetooth that shows "no tide data". Making it pointless. I can't be next to my phone while I am in the water....
Here's the big problem I have with this watch. It does not hold the data while you're in the ocean without your phone (as one does, especially if one has such a waterproof watch). There is no workaround to this issue and it really troubles me because it shows that 1) Garmin didn't do the basic beta-testing with a surfer or 2) they did, and didn't bother to fix what it must have been the first thin the beta-tester noticed

- Does the surf app works well and/or does it drain a lot of battery?

Battery is not an issue, especially if you're surfing in the sun. My experience is that a good direct sunlight offsets the battery drainage and even if it is cloudy, this thing hold up pretty well. As for "works well", well... It does track your long wave rides. As for short beachbreak waves is so-so. My biggest problem is that it counts as a "wave" any intense paddle where you catch speed (even if you don't stand-up and even paddling to go back out), inflating your wave count quite a bit after a surf session. But all other data (calories, avg speed, max speed, heart rate seems ok)

My guess (and hope) is that Garmin focus a little bit of time to fix through software updates both the tide-data issue (my biggest problem with this watch, and probably the hardest, as they might have a hardware/memory limit to solve this) and the wave issue (which I guess can be more of a calibration/tweaking with parameters thing)

0 7030422 over 2 years ago

Just as an update, my experience recently is that they solved the issue below. I've been surfing faaaaar way from my cellphone and I can see the tide data on the watch face with no issues. This is a big plus and I can now say that it is a great watch for surfers :-)
- Does the tide info stay while you go to the beach and surf? Because I see some people saying that without bluetooth that shows "no tide data". Making it pointless. I can't be next to my phone while I am in the water....