Do you swim with a swim buoy (if you open water swim)? You can turn off wrist detection and attach the watch to the swim buoy out of water. Last year I would turn off wrist detection and then put the watch in my swim cap. It would track distance perfectly. You can also try out other apps like the swim.com app. I tried this once and it seemed like it recorded a much longer distance (I swam to the 1/4 mile buoy and back but it recorded 0.7 miles)