I wanted to share my experience regarding Garmin MK2 Descent for Freediving & Spearfishing since 2021

4479545 over 2 years ago

Hi Everyone!!!

I wanted to share my experience regarding Garmin MK2 for Freediving & Spearfishing since 2021.

From my perspective The Good are as follows:

Battery Life is amazing
GPS functionality is excellent & surprisingly good for a watch which is in the sea & needs to quicky acquire satellites after a dive. I often save spots which are otherwise difficult to find in Deep/or Murky Water & I have no problem finding the spots once saved on the watch.
I also occasionally Run and MK 2 has all the related Sports Watch Activity Stats (Heart Rate, Vo2 Max etc.) which is great!
I wear the watch across my palm with a hole in the glove, so I am able to see Heart Rate data as well as all other dive stats which is really nice.
Watch is nice to look at and wear an everyday watch

Things that need to be improved:

As a Freediver I would like to analyze standalone dives. I cannot do so on the Garmin Dive App or on the watch itslef. I would like to see a second by second analysis of each dive starting from zero – for some reason when I look at the profile on the Dive App each dive doesn’t start from zero dive time so I can’t easily tell what time I reached max depth etc - I would need to do some arithmetic & this is hard to do using the fiddly Dive appAon a small screen - Exporting Dives to my PC would solve this in excel but there is no export option in excel (Suunto Dive Manager has the facility to export so Garmin is weak with respect to this functionality).
It would be great if we were able to export single dive with dive time next to depth, HR, temperature for analyzing further in excel.
I noticed that many of my dives are rounded to nearest 5 seconds e.g. when I surface at e.g. 1:32 and I look at the watch but the dive time continues and stops at 1:35 instead which is +3 seconds incorrect. For Freedivers tracking Personal Best time this is a major flaw – I don’t understand why the watch doesn’t end the dive immediately when depth reaches 0.3m below surface and continues to count dive time until nearest 5 seconds.

From my side some improvements to the data fields that can be selected on the surface screen for Apnea/Apnea Hunt are:

Cumulative Dive Time for Apnea Hunt/Apnea Activity Session
Max Dive Time with associated depth for Activity Session
Max Depth with associated dive time for Activity Session

Other important improvements from my side are as follows:

I would also really appreaciate the ability to pause Apnea Hunt/Apnea session and continue after changing dive spots – this is useful for those who want to conserve battery if dive spots are far apart but user doesn’t want to record a separate dive sessions for changing 3-4 spots in an full day diving trip..
As a spearfisher, I would like to see the Activity on Garmin Explore so I could see the boat trails as we change dive spots etc.

I really hope Garmin Team will consider the above in future updates to all Garmin Dive Watches (Descent MK2/I/s and Garmin G1) as the above issues if resolved could really improve the Garmin Customer Experience for Freedivers and Spearfishers & make it superior to competion in every way (e.g. Suunto).

Kind Regards

John

Top Replies

All Replies

0 nradov over 2 years ago

I agree that Garmin Dive should have a way to view that data. But for now you can work around the issue by exporting the FIT file, and then loading it in this web site.

https://www.fitfileviewer.com/

You can then export it again there in a format that Excel will read.

0 4359000 over 2 years ago

Yes, but I like Garmin MK2i more

0 7089752 over 2 years ago

John can you please go into a little more detail on how exactly you locate a nafk? I just can’t seem to figure it out? I’m a spearo and I I took coordinates from navionics and managed to create a saved location on the watch ( this process was in itself difficult) but I can’t see how I locate the mark once I’m on my float swimming to it. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I’m very close to giving up and returning the watch

0 4479545 over 2 years ago in reply to 7089752

use garmin explore and sync the wayoints to the watch, in map mode you should see the markers so you can navigate to the waypoint. before going out to see make sure you can see the marked locations on any map mode chosen.

i hope that helps.

0 7089752 over 2 years ago in reply to 4479545

Ok thanks. I can see the markers on the watch. I assume there is no heading indicator or some sort of directional widget that would tell me the direction to swim and the distance away?

0 4479545 over 2 years ago in reply to 7089752

the current position is a triangle which also shows the direction. you need to keep your hand above water for the GPS to work. practice on land first before going to the sea.

0 nradov over 2 years ago in reply to 7089752

What I do is use the Navigate activity profile on the surface with the routing activity set to "Direct Routing". It shows a map with a heading bug. Then once I'm over the dive site I stop the Navigate activity and start a dive activity. This is a little awkward (especially when riding a DPV) because I have to periodically lift my right wrist above the water to get a position fix but it does work.

0 7089752 over 2 years ago in reply to nradov

Thanks for the direct routing tip! It’s very helpful. I’m almost there I think. I have now set up my dive screen on apnea hunt and the surface screen where I added a compass to the furthest bottom space on the 6 space layout. . I don’t suppose there is a way to get the watch to give you some sort of waypoint indicator? That would be amazing !