Syncing Tide Data to a Garmin Instinct Watch

We aren’t just business here on the blog. We often work on other projects for fun and to keep our programming skills tight. This one is to help us predict the best time to go surfing.

If anybody has the standard Garmin Instinct watch and wants Tide information on their watch is out of luck since Garmin wants you to spend twice as much to buy the fancy expensive Surf edition watch.

There is kinda a workaround by importing data into a Google Calendar with data from NOAA that will schedule events for the predicted tides. So, I decided to write a .NET Core app that goes out to NOAA and pulls back tide predictions, for a station ID that you specify, and a date range to get the predictions. It will then write that information to a CSV file that you can upload to a google map and then sync to your watch.

The .NET Core app will run on most any machine that has .NET Core installed (Windows, Mac, Linux). It will allow you to pass parameters for beginDate, endDate, station ID (from NOAA) and a filename to output the CSV to. What I did is just run it from 1/1/2021 through 12/31/2021 so that I can populate data for the entire year.

You can get my code on Github here: dafoink/tidesToGoogleAPI (github.com)

You can find out a NOAA stationID closest to you by going here: CO-OPS Map – NOAA Tides & Currents

Example, I live on Cape Hatteras, NC. My Station ID is 8654467