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.

In 2016 we ran a 23ft Mirage from Garden Bay to Princess Louisa Inlet.

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.

That trip was one of many. Our summers mostly run through the San Juan Islands, the Gulf Islands, and Desolation Sound, with the occasional trip somewhere warmer: the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Thailand. Neither of us is retired, so every trip is planned against a tight window, and every trip has to be both safe and comfortable.

The homework was the same before every one of them, and so was the thing we kept noticing at the dock: no two captains were working from the same picture, and hardly anyone could say how the forecast had compared to what the water actually did. We just wanted the read before we left.

Tyler had the idea: put the whole read in one place. Dave built the first version of TidePilot, 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.

As heard on Floatplan

Dave joined the Floatplan podcast for the episode “Building a Better Float Plan with TidePilot”: a conversation about the read every cruiser assembles before leaving the dock, across weather, tides, currents, fuel, and timing, the years of Pacific Northwest trips behind TidePilot, and why that whole read belongs in one place.

Listen to the original episode on Floatplan.

The read before you leave™. Plan with TidePilot.