Name: Surf Balls Digital (F6) - Wind, Wave and Tide data
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
Author: pjt_glossop

This is the partner watchface to my Surf Balls widget specifically for the Fenix 6 family of devices (including Enduro and Marq watches) and provides all of the information to decide whether now's the time to go surfing based on 4 key factors (wave height, difference in wind/wave direction, wind speed and wave period) in a set of 4 balls (and the bigger and/or bluer the ball the better!). For a given location and the current hour it will display the surf balls and wind (green) and wave (blue) arrows which move around the edge of the display and scale to denote direction and strength.

You set the location in the watchface settings, my reasoning for this is that personally I want to know about conditions at a location I want to go to, rather than necessarily when I am already there. In addition to the location there are a few other settings :

- The additional data displayed : you can choose between either additional information about the wind (wind speed, gust speed and direction) and wave conditions (wave height, period and direction) or a tide graph for the current day with tide height for current hour

- Whether the surf balls are solids colours (orange...don't bother going through to dark blue...get out there) or scaled (small...don't bother going through to full...get out there)

- The display units : you can choose between imperial and metric

The first time you set the location, or if you change it, it will take up to 10 minutes for the watchface to get the data. This is down to the way that Garmin manages API calls and unfortunately I haven’t found a way around it (yet!).

All of the data is sourced from Stormglass (www.stormglass.io) which is a pretty cool global weather API but you need to register for a free account to get a key which you enter in the watchface settings.

If you like this then you might also be interested in my Surf Balls widget which provides all this and more, including temperatures, tide information, sunrise/set times and UV index for the next 24 hours in one hour timeslots at up to 3 locations (2 you preset and GPS).

I am not a professional developer and I originally started this for as a personal project just for my own use but then decided to share it. If you like it then great, if you don't then that's fine too (just uninstall it). If you find any bugs or have any positive suggestions then please click on 'Contact Developer' as I'm always interested in ways to enhance it.