ZSR Forums

I've been practicing super swimming lately, and it seems very temperamental. For example, I'm trying to swim from Bird's Peak Rock to Forest Haven which are connected diagonally. I get storage, jump into the water and charge up speed. About 3/4 of the way down my air meter, I let it go towards Forest Haven. However, I don't make it all the way there and end up in the boat after drowning. I was sure 3/4 was about enough speed to make it from Dragon Roost to Bird's Peak, let alone a single square! Am I doing it wrong or something? Is there a different method to pick up speed?
All help appreciated. 

Did you check out the speed chart that Abahbob made here?: http://zeldaspeedruns.com/tww/Techniques/superswim

About 2/3 of the way through the charge, you notice there's a major dip in speed that you can get.  It's tricky, but you want to try avoiding releasing the superswim on those frames otherwise you'll lose a lot of potential speed.  For me, and I don't know if this is a good practice or not, I generally start map buffering right before I hear the second 'glug' of Link drowning when the air meter turns red, usually I get decent speed releasing right around there.  Hopefully that helps some!

One way to build up much more speed while superswimming is to hold the control stick a little to the right or to the left instead of just pushing it straight up. If you have the control stick at a slight left or right angle (depending) Link will move straight back-and-forth in the water instead of in a circle. The best way to find this angle is to look at your mini-map at the bottom of the screen to see if you are more back-and-forth, or in more of a general circle. This can take some practice, and the specific angle on the control stick is almost never the same twice, but always resides in the top 180 degrees of the control stick.
Note though, that if you superswim to another island to refill your air meter and then want to superswim again, your mini-map won't be viable. You can however use look at the island in the quadrant to see if you've got the stick at the proper angle. If the island stays at relatively behind you instead of "rotating" around, then you've got it. You can also open up your sea chart at different intervals to see if your yellow arrow only comes up in one of two positions which mirror each other.

It's key to remember that the speed you get is essentially luck. Certain frames are faster than others. Sometimes you'll just get shitty speed. If you didn't get out of a single square, you probably did something wrong. Read Razor's post.