Dawn Patrol

It was a few years back when I started seeing gps surf watches that tracked your sessions and didn’t think until now that there might just be an app for my Apple Watch. The first time I used it was pretty straight forward. You just start your session and forget about it. It was pretty cool to glance at my wrist after every wave and see how far I went or how fast I was going. Then getting out of the water and looking at the more detailed stats on my phone when I got back to my car was pretty cool, especially the map that shows the waves you caught. It can even display the waves you attempted to catch but didn’t. I’m usually in the water for about an hour on weekdays before I have to get my day started and I found myself trying to reach certain goals like 15 waves before the hour is up. Since the watch app shows it at a quick glance, it makes you want to try harder and challenge yourself. I probably won’t be wearing my watch in the water all that much because I hate getting a watch tan, but every once in a while this would be a great way to get some unique stats about your surfing.

I’ve been using this app for the past few weeks. It’s recording my waves but the distance travelled is way off. My guess is that it’s calculating distance travelled by adding the distance paddled after my last wave plus the actual distance surfed. Additionally, it’s registering way more waves than I’m actually catching. The main reason I’m using the app is to capture my speeds but due to the miscounting of waves it’s hard to see what my speeds are. The app has ways to go to catch up to the ripcurl gps watch but it’s a good start. One thing I’d like to see on the next iteration is a battery indicator, a LTE signal display, and a missed call/text count or indicator. Might as well take advantage of the Apple Watch 3 hardware. I bought the watch to specifically receive calls and messages while I’m surfing but the app does not take full advantage of these features and constantly unlocking the Digital Crown to check missed calls/texts, or battery life makes using the watch with the app more difficult. Keep going, this app has lots of utility potential.

Overall, I like this app so the developer can keep working on accuracy issue. My only concern (yet the most important factor) is accuracy. After a session in the water, there are always multiple random moving records nearby land locations. I even don’t understand why it happens. Maybe hardware limitation(?) of not capable of keeping constant GPS signal? Also even in the water, I got some records about movement that I even didn’t try (or move a bit). I guess there are some random location hopping in general and the app considers as a ride. Finally location names are incorrect even in CA. Honestly I’m not sure these issues are completely fixable due to hardware (apple watch 3) limitation, but I hope the developer can figure out better ways in terms of software aspect.

i’ve been using an app called surface and until i tried this app, i thought i was buggy but fine. This app blows it away being much more accurate (at least for me in SoCal) and user-friendly. Not sure how the “spot” function works as i have sharing location on but it seems to want me to set my location to somewhere in Nebraska. Only suggestion/wish for improvement is to add an apple watch compilation so that we can start a surf session from the watch quickly. Another might be to add an option to automatically stop the session if you spin the dial to unlock the watch from the water lock. Big thanks to the developers for making a useful app!

I really want this to work. And I hope the folks behind it keep working on it and improving, but at this point in time I’m finding that the app does not really work as advertised. There seems to be real issues with GPS accuracy. I’m using Apple Watch 5 and at the end of my sessions, I see 30-40 waves caught, 5min rides, rides that end halfway up the beach, etc, etc. I’ve tried the different wave sensitivity settings and it doesn’t seem to make any difference. I have no idea whether it’s the GPS signal from the watch or how they’re handling the data, but it definitely doesn’t work as intended. I hope the developers keep improving this - it has the potential to be great!