Car time from home to wherever the boat actually is — dock, mooring, or ramp.
Loading gear, untying, and getting underway once you're at the boat — and the same in reverse at the end.
Running time on the water from the dock out to where you'll actually fish — not the drive there.
How long you actually want lines in the water. This is what we size the tide window around.
How many different spots you plan to hit in one trip, not counting the ride out and back.
Boat travel time moving from one spot to the next. This comes out of your fishing time above, not added on top.
Keeps you off the water near dead-low tide — the riskiest time to run through shallow channels or sandbars, and often a slow bite anyway. Raise this if your route has shallow spots you're wary of.
Only matters when "Consider all-day voyage" is checked — length of the rest between fishing the incoming tide into the high slack, then the first hour of the outgoing tide.
My grandfather Pete had one rule that came before every other rule on the water: safety first, always. He was meticulous about it. Before a trip ever left the dock, he'd already worked through the tide, the wind, the time of day, how long the run out would take, how long it would take to get back — all of it, every time, no shortcuts. And if the conditions didn't line up, he didn't push it. He'd cancel the trip. No second-guessing, no "it'll probably be fine." Safety decided the day, not the other way around.
That kind of discipline is easy to admire and hard to actually do every single time. Real trip planning means checking the tide charts, cross-referencing the wind forecast, working out sunrise and sunset, figuring out how a low tide might strand you in a channel on the way out or the way back, and doing the math on when you actually need to leave the house to make it all work — before you've even left the driveway. It's a lot to hold in your head, especially on a weekday morning before work.
This website does that work the way Pete would have done it: automatically, thoroughly, and without cutting corners. It pulls real NOAA tide predictions and live wind, temperature, and rain forecasts, checks them against the same kind of rules he lived by — no fishing before sunrise or after dark, no cutting it close to a low tide in the channel — and tells you plainly which windows are genuinely good, which are workable, and which you should skip entirely. When a trip doesn't meet the bar, it says so, the same way Pete would have just called the whole thing off.
It's not about fishing more. It's about fishing smart, and knowing — before you ever untie the lines — that the conditions actually support a safe trip out and a safe trip back.
Built in his memory, and in keeping with his rule.
Used it for a trip? Found something confusing, wrong, or missing? A line or two helps a lot — this goes straight to me, not a mailbox nobody checks.