About

Built by captains, for captains.

Dave Siegfried and Tyler Wilson aboard a 23ft Mirage tied to the dock at Princess Louisa Inlet, British Columbia. — Princess Louisa Inlet, 2016. The smallest boat on the dock by a wide margin.

In 2016 we ran a 23ft Mirage up to Princess Louisa Inlet. We trailered to Garden Bay, launched there, and ran Jervis Inlet. We knew what Malibu Rapids does on the tide, and we knew the boat was light enough and had power enough that we did not have to plan around it. Knowing was the point.

We were the smallest boat on the dock by a wide margin, and all weekend captains came by to ask where we had come from.

That dock talk was also how we planned. Before we left, and at every stop along the way, we asked whoever had been up recently what they had found. The old chartplotter did its job and the charts kept us off the rocks. Everything else was tide and current tables, the VHF forecast, and a lot of asking around, put together by hand at the dock and put together again the next morning.

TidePilot started with two friends who spent a lot of time boating in the San Juan Islands, the Gulf Islands, and Desolation Sound, with occasional trips to the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Thailand, and more.

Neither of us is retired. Every trip was planned against a tight window, and every trip had to be both safe and comfortable. So before each one we did the same work: hunting down wind, swell, tide, current, and the advisories, then reconciling a half-dozen sources by hand at the dock. And we kept noticing the same thing: no two captains were working from the same picture, and few could say how the forecast had compared to what the water actually did.

Tyler had the idea: put that whole read in one place. Dave, a venture-backed start-up founder, built the first version, and we started sharing it with friends. Enough of them asked to keep using it, and sent back enough of their own hard-won knowledge, that we decided to open it to every captain.

The hope is simple. Make the marine conditions easy to gather and easy to understand, give captains a better way to learn from one another, and help all of us enjoy the water while we respect it, and each other, safely.

The wake of a 23ft Mirage running down a steep-walled inlet under clear sky, snow still on the peaks above the treeline. — Heading back out.

Know before you go. Plan with TidePilot.