BubbleJournal

Garmin Descent dive log: take your dives out of Garmin Dive

Updated October 19, 2026

Garmin Dive shows your Descent dives, but only your Garmin ones, and there's little way to take them anywhere else. Every Descent saves its dives as FIT files, and BubbleJournal reads them, so they can sit beside the dives from any other computer you have dived with.

From a file

Save the dives from Garmin Descent's software, then choose the files on the Import page, many at once or as a zip.

  • Garmin Connect on the web: open the dive, then the gear menu, then Export Original (a zip): .zip, .fit

What comes across

  • The depth profile and water temperature
  • Gases, with oxygen and helium, and the switches between them; setpoints on closed circuit
  • The watch's own NDL, time to surface, nitrogen loading and CNS through the dive
  • Where you went in, from the GPS fix at the surface
  • Tissue loading at the start and end, CNS and OTU, as the watch worked them out

Every file you import is kept exactly as uploaded, so nothing is lost if BubbleJournal learns to read more of it later.

What doesn't

  • The app can't download from a Descent over Bluetooth: export the dives from Garmin Connect instead.
  • Tank pressures from a Descent T1 or T2 transmitter aren't read yet, so these dives show no air consumption (SAC).
  • Notes and the dive site name you add in Garmin Dive stay there: the FIT file holds what the watch recorded.

Its decompression model

The Descent uses Bühlmann ZHL-16C with gradient factors, set by a conservatism level or by hand. Where the file holds it, the computer's own NDL comes across with each dive. BubbleJournal also works the NDL and tissue loading out again with one model, Bühlmann ZHL-16C, so dives from any computer can be compared: why your computer and your logbook disagree.

What the numbers mean

Other dive computers · Keep your Garmin Descent dives in BubbleJournal, free