I just picked up a 2S Solar Surf Edition with a main interest in the surf tracking. My everyday surf watches are the Rip Curl Mini Rifles and Rip Curl SearchGPS 2. I have a smaller wrist, so the SearchGPS 2 is pretty big for me, and I end up only taking it out on better days where I would want to know wave tracking info because it's bulky and doesn't fit my wrist that well. On most other days, I would have the Mini Rifles when surfing. The 2S is just the right size for my wrist, being a little bigger than the Mini Rifles and smaller than the SearchGPS 2.
The Instinct 2 series has a lot more functionality than the SearchGPS 2, even though the SearchGPS 2 is much larger. There are a couple interface/software improvements that would make this watch really competitive to the SearchGPS 2 as a surf-focused watch:
- Change the Tides to a Widget that can be placed in the Glances rather having it as an Activity. Tides are currently categorized as an Activity on the watch, which means that while recording a surfing activity, you cannot simultaneously check detailed tide information without stopping the surfing activity. You can add a tide graph to the watch face and go back to the watch face while tracking an activity, but the watch face tide graph only shows the general tide trend with the time of the next high/low tide and does not show the actual tide measurement. I added a tide graph widget from the ConnectIQ store, but I've been getting an error where I can't access the widget at times and need to restart the watch to get the widget working again. This problem only happens with third party widgets and does not happen with the built-in widgets. To avoid this issue, Garmin should just recategorize the Tides as a widget so that it can be added to the Glances and be accessible during activity tracking.
- Improve the wave tracking algorithm. As I've seen many others state in this forum, this is the area where the Instinct 2 really needs improvement. The SearchGPS 2 really outperforms the Instinct 2 in surf tracking: the SearchGPS 2 isn't perfect at tracking waves but tracks waves accurately about 70-80% of the time, whereas in all the sessions so far where I've used the 2S, it tracks maybe 20% of the waves accurately. The 2S sometimes registers waves when I'm just sitting in the water, and the most common issue I have is that the 2S somehow thinks that the speeds are much faster than they are. The first time I surfed with the 2S, it told me my max speed was over 300mph. I played around with the configuration, such as changing the tracking to every second and trying GPS+GLONASS vs GPS+Galileo, but I haven't been able to find any configuration that delivers accurate wave tracking comparable to the SearchGPS 2 because the 2S still tells me I'm catching waves faster than 50mph at least once in each surf session. To address the speed issue, Garmin could program speed thresholds to try to ensure that wave tracking is more accurate in recognizing a wave and determining the top speed reached on a wave. Either way, it appears the wave tracking algorithm needs improvement because I saw someone say that they used the WavesTracker App with Strava and got more accurate wave tracking results. The Instinct 2 surfing app, which is pretty much the sole reason a surfer would get an Instinct 2 Surf Edition, needs to function as good as or better than the competition but isn't quite there yet.
There is a lot of potential for this to be a very good all-around watch because it already has a bunch of useful everyday features like phone notifications, step & vital tracking, and Garmin Pay. If the surf functionality is improved, the Instinct 2 would be a combined smartwatch and surf watch replacement.
