What's on guys! Today I'm gonna show you how to turn your Apple watch into the
ultimate surf watch!
So as a traveling surfer I'm always keen to track all the
awesome breaks I'm paddling out at - whether that's the Maldives, Indonesia, Morocco,
South Africa, Australia or beyond. So when the Apple watch first came out I was
like "sweet it can track swimming surely it can track surfing as well"? Well the
answer wasn't quite as easy to find as I thought and I spent a long time trawling
through the internet trying to find guides, trying to find the right apps, add-ons,
complications - it's a bit of a mess out there!
Luckily I've now managed to narrow down to 2 FREE apps (yup totally free!) that will
help you turn your Apple Watch into the ultimate surf watch! So this guide is just
going to give you a simple rundown of everything you need to do to get the
surf report, tides and your waves on your Apple watch
Let's get the obvious question out of the way is the Apple watch waterproof? Well yes it is!
Apple Watch Series 3 onwards is waterproof - it's not depth proof but it
was certainly enough to cover surfing and swimming. So Happy days
no need to worry about that!
So first up we're going to configure the Surface App. Now this is
the app that's going to give you access to your tidal data and most importantly
your surf report. Yet you can get your surf report right here on the watch
face you can easily just have a quick check and be like "sweet let's go for a surf"!
So launch the app on your iPhone, click plus in the top left and then you
can select from a list of spots from Magicseaweed and just click select.
Then what you need to do is head down to the options in the bottom right and where it
says complications just tap it until it says tides and you can select tide
indicator as well. I personally just prefer this tide option because it
gives a nice little icon on your home screen of your watch.
so now it's time to
make sure everything is set up on your Apple watch as well. So on your iPhone
launch the watch app, head down to the list of apps at the bottom and click
install on both Surface and Dawn Patrol. Now this will take a
couple of minutes but once that's all done you're all set up. And you can see
in the installed apps and complications section that they're both listed in
there which is very important for the next stage.
With both of those installed
on your Apple watch is now time to set up your actual watch face to display
everything you want. Now as you can see from my screen I've gone with the
module option just because it gives the clearest overview of everything and
allows me to put in a couple of time zones for London and Sydney which I also
need. Head down to the complications section and if you want
the full surf report (which I'm assuming you do) you'll need to select the
middle section for this so click that then scroll all the way down until you
hit the Surface section, select that and boom it all updates and as you can see
in the modular bit at the top you can now got your surf report there.
The second section you'll want to setup is the tide. As you can see I've gone for
the bottom-left section for that, so again click on that, scroll all the way
down to Surface, click OK and you'll find that you've now got a nice little tide
icon in the bottom left. Obviously you can move those things around as you want
but yeah the most important thing to remember on that is middle if you want
the surf report.
So the surfs pumping, let's go track some
of your waves using the Dawn Patrol app! Now you'll be pleased to know this is
way simpler than getting everything else set up so don't worry about that it's just a
case of going out to the beach, getting leashed up, ready to paddle out, then all
you have to do is hit the crown button on your Apple watch, launch the Dawn Patrol
app by clicking the icon and you'll have a nice simple page that
simply says start session, with a big button. Hit that button and you're good to go,
it's as simple as that!
So while you're out in the water with Dawn Patrol
running on your Apple watch you'll notice a few things on the screen.
As you kick out of a wave you'll get the stats from that particular wave. So that'll be
your fastest speed, your total ride time and your total ride length and that
information will appear for about a minute on the screen and you can adjust
that before you go for a surf. So you can quickly check and see how good your
last ride was. When that's not on the screen you'll have the stats from your
overall session - so your total ride time, your total wave count and your total ride length.
And then also in the corner you'll have
your current heart rate and on the other corner you'll have your total session
time as well - so you've got all the stats you need right on your wrist as you're in the line up
You've had an epic surf session, you caught loads of waves and your app has
been running on your watch the entire time tracking everything. So the
first thing you need to do when you get out of the water is stop the app session.
All you need to do that is spin the crown on your app watch this will
deactivate waterproof mode, it'll make some beeps. Then on the the watch
face all you do is press stop session. now this can be a bit fiddly if your
hands and the watch is wet so it might be worth using a t-shirt or a towel just
to dry your hands and the watch before doing that and then it's a case of just
uploading the data to your phone by launching the Dawn Patrol app and we can
have a look at your session
So what details does Dawn Patrol track
on your surf session? Well there's an easy way to find out just jump into the app.
All you need to do is go onto your iPhone launch the Dawn Patrol app and it
will give you a list of all your surf sessions as you can see here, along with
the surf spot you were at. So let's jump into my last test surf session 10th of June
at Oldmans where I got 9 waves so as you can see the first thing you've got
is a GPS satellite overview of the surf spot. which is pretty cool to check
out especially if you're surfing points and things like that, it's a good way of
checking the reef. If you zoom in you can then click on individual waves to view
your stats. So as you can see here, wave 7, this is top speed of 21mph,
length of 184 meters and I rode that wave for 31 seconds - so a pretty sick wave
overall! And you can then swipe up and it'll give you a bit more of an in-depth
overview of that wave including your speed throughout it. So as you can see a
little bit of a paddle, drop in that's where my top speed is and then a few
turns in there to generate speed along the wave as well. If you go back
to the overall screen of your your surf session you can also swipe up and it
will give you even more details. So as you can see I've got 9 waves, I surfed for
a total of 1.4 kilometers and a total ride of 3 minutes 45 seconds.
On this screen you've also got where your waves are in terms of where the tide is,
so that's pretty cool, you can check out your speed of each wave. You can see
there my top speed was wave 2 at 22.1mph and then
also your distances as well, You can see my top ride that one was ride 4,
223 meters long which is pretty sick! Now also on the main screen of
your session you can also select the stack button and it will also display
your missed waves! Which is slightly depressing so I don't really look into
this but it's good to see where your missing waves and where you're kind of
turning on a paddle on the way back out to see if you can get a cheeky insider
If you head back into the main section of the app as well you can
select boards so you can add different boards you're riding and attach them to
different surf sessions, You can see you know which board performs best at which
break and then of course you can go into your records as well which displays
everything. So as you see since I've been using the watch I've caught 619 waves
surf for a total distance of 39.2 kilometers and stood up on
waves for two hours and five minutes! You can see my top speed was 26.8mph
Coffee bay in South Africa - sick wave!
My longest wave was 231 meters long at Green Mount which is surf spot next to
Snapper Rocks in Australia and my best wave time was a 39 second ride at
Chickens in the Maldives which is off to Thulusdhoo Island. And yeah it's pretty
cool to keep track of everything and you can also link it to your Facebook
profile so you can share your waves and you can also sync it to the cloud so if
you lost your phone your watch or changed anything, you can still get
back all the stats from your surf. So yeah that's the Dawn Patrol app, it's
pretty sick little app as you can see the interface is really nice you can set
up a profile picture and things like that as well. Highly recommend it and
the perfect way to track your surf
Also one thing I've been asked quite
frequently is how much does the Apple watch cost and why would I do this over
getting a RipCurl GPS watch? Now for me I'm using the Apple Watch Series 3 which
now retails at £279 and is actually reasonably on par price-wise
with the RipCurl GPS 2 series which is £220. For me personally that extra bit
of money to get all the extra features of the Apple Watch, as well as being able
to display the surf report directly on the watch face was definitely
worth it. If you do opt for the Apple Watch Series 4 there is a bigger price
gap so it really depends on your personal budget on that side of things.
But overall I think as an iPhone user as well having all the extra features and
apps and tracking things of the Apple watch does make it a better investment
than the Rip Curl one
And there you have it guys that's my guide to turning your
Apple watch into the ultimate surf watch! If you do have any questions please feel
free to put them in the comments below and I will respond and I've also linked
in the description to my written blog post just in case you find that a little
bit easier to follow. So yeah guys that's it for this week make sure you
like, comment and subscribe and enjoy your tracking all your surf sessions!
See you in the lineup!
Yeeewwwwww!