Methodology

How a brief gets made.

Saturday, two legs, crew aboard. The wind app says one thing, the buoy says another, and the current turns sometime midday. The read you used to assemble by hand at the dock, source by source, is the read TidePilot assembles before you get there. This page is the full accounting of how.

Where a brief begins

A brief starts with the two facts you already know: where you are leaving from and where you are going. Give TidePilot a start and a destination, in plain words, and it plans the route, reads the sources below along it, and returns the brief with a recommendation. Refine from there if you want: shift the departure day, tighten your crew’s wind and sea limits, or question a leg. The advisor researches; the captain decides.

What TidePilot reads

Every brief starts from more than 30 forecast models, station networks, and observation feeds: global and regional weather models, the official marine forecasts and warnings on both sides of the border, tide and current predictions, and live buoy reports. US and Canadian waters are both first-class, one coherent brief across the border.

Which of those sources to trust for what, where, and when is TidePilot’s own work, so we keep the recipe to ourselves. What a captain should hold us to is the standard every input meets: stamped with its age, kept honest about being a forecast or an observation, and disclosed plainly when it is missing.

Forecasts and observations are different things

A model predicts; a buoy reports. TidePilot keeps the two distinct in every brief and stamps each read with its age, so you can see what is measured, what is predicted, and how fresh each one is. A forecast hour is never dressed up as an observation.

Every leg gets its own moment

A route is legs, and each leg is read at that leg’s estimated arrival time, not at departure. On a six-hour trip, leg three uses the forecast for where you will be and when you will be there. One trip, six different forecast moments, one brief.

When sources disagree, the brief says so

Thirty models rarely agree perfectly. TidePilot does not silently average the difference away: where sources split or coverage runs thin, the brief discloses it as a gap in plain language. If no station or model covers a leg’s water, the brief tells you what is missing instead of inventing a number.

Warnings can cap the read

An active marine warning crossing your route caps the recommendation no matter how good the raw numbers look. The brief names the warning and shows its official window; when a source provides no end time, TidePilot says that too, rather than estimating one.

Your boat is in the math

The same water is a different trip in a different boat. Your boat profile (cruise speed, fuel burn, tank size) meets the route and each leg’s conditions to produce a real fuel reserve, and your saved wind and sea limits decide what counts as comfortable for your crew. The brief is tuned to your boat, not a generic one.

A brief is a snapshot that knows it will age

Refreshing a brief re-reads every source. Trip Watch, a premium feature, keeps reading conditions on saved trips and updates you before departure when the forecast shifts. And because forecast confidence falls as the horizon stretches, a brief far from departure says so plainly instead of pretending week-out certainty.

What TidePilot will not do

TidePilot plans. It does not navigate, it does not track you underway, and it is not collision avoidance. When a primary source is unreachable and a fallback is used, the brief discloses it and the confidence that goes with it. The recommendation is a read, not an order: the captain decides.

TidePilot is a planning advisor, not a navigation system. Always confirm conditions with current observations and use a marine chartplotter for navigation underway.