No Surf Mode on Your Garmin? Make Your Own Surf Activity

No Surf activity on your Garmin? Make your own

Garmin keeps its Surfing activity for the outdoor and adventure watches: fēnix, epix, Enduro, Instinct, MARQ, quatix, tactix and the Descent range. Every Forerunner (up to and including the Forerunner 970), every Venu (the Venu 4 too), the vívoactive line and the Approach golf watches simply don't have it.

What they all do have is Stand Up Paddleboarding. That profile tracks speed and distance with GPS, which is exactly what you want in the water. You can turn it into a surf activity in about a minute.

Step 1: copy the SUP activity

1. Open the activities list on your watch and go to Edit
2. Choose Add, then Copy Activity
3. Pick SUP as the activity to copy
4. Name it Surf

The exact menu names vary slightly between models, but the Copy Activity option is there on all of them. Copying instead of editing SUP directly keeps your original paddleboarding profile untouched, with its own settings.

Step 2: set up one data screen

Open the settings of your new Surf activity, go to Data Screens, and build one screen with four fields:

• Max speed: the fastest you went on a wave, and the number you'll check first after every session
• Distance: everything you covered, paddling included
• Heart rate: paddling back out through a set is a lot harder work than it looks from the beach
• Time of day: so you know when to head in without hunting for a clock

One screen is enough. Nobody scrolls through data pages while sitting on a board waiting for the next set.

What a homemade Surf activity won't do

Underneath, a copied SUP profile is still a SUP profile. The native Surfing activity on the higher-end watches detects and counts individual waves, and yours won't. After syncing, the session also shows up in Garmin Connect as Stand Up Paddleboarding. If you want your surf sessions kept separate, change the activity type to Surfing in Garmin Connect.

Also expect the odd GPS spike. Satellites are lost the moment your wrist goes under, so if a max speed looks impossibly high after a wipeout, that's usually why.

Check the tides before you paddle out

While you're setting up your watch anyway, install the free Tides app. It shows high and low tide times for the next 7 days right on your wrist, works offline, and is a lot quicker than digging your phone out on the beach.

More about the Tides app →

Get the Tides app →