Preventing keynote with Apple Watch/iPhone combo from timing out

I have my Apple watch paired with my iPhone for running keynote presentations. But an annoying interruption occurs after approximately 15 seconds or so. The message "looking for iPhone" appears on the watch. Sometimes raising my wrist causes the message to clear and I have control over the keynote again. Most times though, I have to tap the watch to get it to re-establish the connection to the keynote on iPhone.

This is annoying to have to do, especially if you are using the double tap gesture to 'blindly' advance to the next slide, which is kind of slick, but if you don't get that haptic feedback and the advance to next slide is not working, I tend to look at the watch, and have to tap it again to get the keynote back.

Is there a setting I can set to disable this? I suspect this is a power saving feature, but I'm less interested in conserving watch battery power than having a seamless keynote experience.

thank you

James