Surf Local

Tide and swell on one graph, so you can see what the swell is doing on any tide. Built for people who check the water before anything else. READ THIS FIRST - YOU NEED A FREE API KEY Surf Local gets marine and tide data from Stormglass. It will show no surf data at all until you add your own key. This takes about two minutes and costs nothing. 1. Go to stormglass.io and sign up. The free plan is enough. 2. Copy your API key. 3. In Garmin Connect on your phone, open the watch face settings for Surf Local. 4. Paste the key into "Stormglass API key". That is the whole setup. Everything else works on its own. The free Stormglass plan allows 10 requests a day. Surf Local is built to stay inside that: it refreshes every 6 hours by default, tracks what it has spent, and stops before it runs you over the limit. If you have a second free account you can add a second key and it will fall through to it when the first is spent. WHAT THE FACE SHOWS Top - first light and last light. Civil twilight, not sunrise and sunset, because that is when you can actually see to paddle out. Calculated on the watch, so it costs nothing and works with no phone. Left - wind speed and direction, gust below it. The gust turns orange when it is more than 1.6 times the steady wind. Air temperature beside it. Right - swell height, direction and period, and water temperature. Middle - time, date, heart rate, steps and the moon phase. The moon matters because it tells you whether you are on springs or neaps. Bottom - the graph. Two days on one time axis. Tide is the filled shape, swell is the line over it, so reading straight up from a tide gives you the swell at that tide. A vertical line marks right now and another marks midnight. Every high and low has a marker, and the next four are labelled with their times, white for a high and grey for a low. The swell range for the two days sits above the graph, with a weather icon for today on the left and tomorrow on the right. Underneath - where the forecast is for. Teal means the data is current for that place. Amber means that is where you are but the numbers have not landed yet. IT FINDS THE BREAK ITSELF Surf Local carries a list of 175 New Zealand surf breaks and coastal towns built into the app. It takes the position your watch already has and names the nearest one, with no internet, no lookup and no request. Travel and it follows you. Outside New Zealand it shows your coordinates instead, and you can type your own label in the settings to override it at any time. A watch face cannot turn the GPS on, so Surf Local uses a position your watch has already established, from a recent activity, a cached fix or the weather. If you have not used GPS in a while, start any activity briefly and it will pick the new position up. WEATHER ICONS The two day weather icons come from your watch's own forecast, not from Stormglass, so they cost nothing against your daily allowance. SETTINGS Stormglass API key, and an optional second key Fixed location, if you want it pinned to one break instead of following you Refresh interval, 1 to 24 hours Distance before it re-fetches for a new place Tide datum, MSL or LAT Wind units, knots or km/h Location label, to override the automatic name REQUIREMENTS A phone connected to Garmin Connect, because a watch face has no internet of its own. Without a connection the face still shows time, date, light times, moon, heart rate and steps, and keeps showing the last surf data it fetched. Not affiliated with Stormglass. Tide predictions are astronomical and do not account for weather. Use official sources where it matters.

Version 1.2.0 FIXED - THE SWELL LINE NOW HAS A WAKE OF ITS OWN The swell line and the swell range have been blank since the graph was introduced. The cause was structural, not a parsing detail. The background service was making three web requests in a single wake: conditions, then tide, then the swell forecast. A Connect IQ background process gets roughly 30 seconds before it is terminated, and three round trips through the phone did not fit inside it. The first two landed, which is why wind, swell now and tide always worked, and the third was cut off before its callback could run. No error was ever recorded because the code that would have recorded it never executed. The forecast is now fetched on its own background wake, five minutes after the conditions land, with the full time budget to itself. Daily request use is unchanged at 9 of the 10 the free Stormglass plan allows. DAY TEMPERATURES Low and high beside each weather icon, in white, reading as 11/18. Forced to Celsius, because Garmin returns these in whatever unit the watch is set to. Version 1.1.2 and 1.1.1 Earlier attempts at the swell forecast. The response is now unwrapped the same way the working calls do it, the window matches the 48 hours the graph draws rather than 72, and the "fetched today" marker is only set once data actually arrives so a failed fetch retries instead of locking out until the next day. Larger moon phase icon. Version 1.1.0 TIDE AND SWELL ON ONE GRAPH The tide curve and the swell forecast share a single two day time axis. Read straight up from any tide and you get the swell at that tide. Tide is the filled shape, swell is the line over it. EVERY HIGH AND LOW MARKED Each turning point gets a marker on the graph, and the next four are labelled with their times, white for a high and grey for a low. IT NAMES YOUR BREAK A list of 175 New Zealand surf breaks and coastal towns is built into the app. The face names the nearest one to wherever your watch is, with no internet and no API request. Travel and it follows you. Outside New Zealand it shows your coordinates. Your own label in the settings still overrides it. No API key is shipped with the app. Add your own in Garmin Connect.