Grande Traversée — Buoys, Feeds and Shore

How far is left, which way the next buoy is, and where the shore is. This data field goes inside the watch's own Open Water Swim activity. The activity keeps recording the official FIT file, the stroke metrics, the alerts — nothing is taken away from it. The field adds only what the watch cannot know on its own: where you are on YOUR course. WHAT YOU SEE • Distance remaining, in large digits — the question you actually ask when your head comes out of the water • A progress bar with one notch per feed station • Elapsed time, and pace per 100 m • The next buoy, with the heading to it • A safety heading back to shore — to the nearest of your evacuation points, never to a single one fixed at the start SET IT UP BEFORE THE RACE Every waypoint is yours to enter, from Garmin Connect on your phone: Connect IQ - Data Fields - this field - Settings. Waypoints are typed as: name,latitude,longitude For example: Feed 1,-20.4801,57.3167 Decimal degrees. South and west are negative. A semicolon works instead of a comma if that is easier on your keyboard. Up to six waypoints, and up to six evacuation points. ONE EVACUATION POINT PER BUOY A single evacuation point cannot serve a ten-kilometre course along a coast: past the first buoy it already points nowhere useful. Set one per buoy, on the shore. The field always shows the heading to the NEAREST of them, so it changes by itself as you pass each buoy - and it stays right if you drift or skip one. An evacuation point takes an optional fourth value, the compass heading of the land at that spot: name,latitude,longitude,heading For example: Shore 2,-20.44317,57.33707,192 That fourth value is what lets the watch refuse a heading that would send you out to sea. A latitude typed without its minus sign, or a point picked on the far side of a bay, produces a heading away from the coast; the watch ignores that point and falls back to the fixed shore heading rather than pointing you offshore. Leave the fourth value out and the check uses the fixed heading instead, which is coarser. CHECK YOUR POINTS BEFORE THE RACE Stand on the beach where each evacuation point is, or open it on a map, and confirm the arrow would take a swimmer TOWARD land. Every point should sit on the shoreline itself, not on a reef, not across a bay, not on the far bank of a river mouth. Pick your race format — solo 10 km, a 5 km relay leg, a 2.5 km relay leg, or fins — and the target distance follows. You can also override the distance outright, set a fixed shore heading instead of a point, and switch to a larger typeface. Leave a waypoint empty, or mistype one, and the field simply skips it. Nothing breaks mid-race. WHY A DATA FIELD AND NOT AN APP An app would have to record its own session, and you would lose the native swim metrics and the official file. A data field sits in one of your data screens and leaves the rest of the watch alone. ON SAFETY The shore heading is an aid, not a safety net. Support boats are the safety net. GPS only catches a fix when your wrist clears the water, so treat every heading as approximate. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO It does not measure water temperature — no watch has a sensor for it. It does not need the touchscreen: everything is set before you get in. It does not send anything anywhere; your waypoints stay on your watch. SUPPORTED WATCHES fenix 6, 7, 8 and fenix E · epix and epix Pro · Enduro, Enduro 2 and 3 · Forerunner 165, 245, 255, 265, 570, 745, 945, 955, 965, 970 · Instinct 2, 2X, 3, E and Crossover · Descent Mk2, Mk2S, Mk3, Mk3i, G1, G2 · D2 Air X15 and D2 Mach 1 Pro · quatix 6 and 6X · tactix 7 and 8 · Venu 3, 3S and 4 · vivoactive 5 and 6. Garmin Swim 2 cannot run Connect IQ data fields and is not supported.

2.0 — Evacuation points, one per buoy. Version 1 had a single evacuation point for the whole course. Past the first buoy it pointed nowhere useful. There are now six, and the safety heading always follows the nearest one, so it changes by itself as you pass a buoy. Each evacuation point can carry the heading of the land at that spot, as a fourth value. The watch uses it to refuse a point that would send you out to sea - a latitude typed without its minus sign, or a point on the far side of a bay. It falls back to the fixed shore heading instead. The point selection is covered by automated tests running against real coordinates from the course. 1.0 — First release. Race formats (solo, relay legs, fins), six waypoints with their own names and coordinates, an evacuation point and a fixed shore heading. Checked in the simulator on eleven screen sizes, down to the 1-bit Instinct display.