Garmin Swim 2 GPS-Tracking not working in open water

Hi Lars,

Try to track on your other wrist. E.g. if you wore the watch on the left arm, switch it to the right. For me it made the magic. At the beginning for several months Swim2 never gave me any usable result, but since I switched to the right is works always well.

Some extra explanation:

Swim2 (and all the other new Garmin watches) use a very sophisticated method to calculate the right OW track, as there is a big challenge to relocate at every stroke. I guess that the watch not only searches for GPS signal passively, but checks the signal only if it thinks that the watch is out of the water and should find signal. If you do anything wonky underwater with your arm, the watch will search for the signal underwater without any success. That messes up the algorithm, and re-finding the right location will be more difficult for the watch, causing temporary or permanent signal loss. 

I got this idea after I saw my swim after a video analysis. I had the impression earlier that I swim symmetrically and stable. The analysis showed that I make some extra scooping movement underwater, especially with my left hand. The watch did not work for me on the left, but works well on the right. Since I started to smooth out that extra movement, track with the right arm got even smoother, and track on the left started to show improvement as well.

p.s.:

What I wrote is true only if you use freestyle (front crawl). With breaststroke you will always get the same empty results what you have now

Did you ever get this issue sorted? I’ve done 2 open water swims with my Garmin 2 (bought specifically to track my ow swims!) tracks start of swim and end - exactly like your first map, but no tracking of actual swim. V disappointed.