Salty Podcast #76 ⛵ PredictWind: Weather Tools Every Sailor Should Know

Have you ever found yourself desperately checking multiple weather apps before casting off, still uncertain if you're making the right call? In this episode, we dive deep into the technology that's revolutionizing how sailors make weather-based decisions with Karen McMaster from PredictWind.

Karen brings extraordinary credentials to this conversation – she's not just a support team member at PredictWind, but a third-generation sailor who has raced around the world twice and recently took her 17-year-old daughter on her first offshore passage. "I wanted to make sure my daughter had a good experience," Karen explains, "so understanding the weather, routing it, and letting her know what to expect was key."

We explore why using multiple forecast models creates more confidence than relying on a single source. "It's like having six meteorologists sitting around the table," Karen notes, demonstrating how consensus between models helps sailors make better decisions. The discussion covers everything from high-resolution forecasting that reveals wind funneling between islands to detailed comfort parameters like roll and vertical acceleration that can predict seasickness before you leave the dock.

Perhaps most fascinating is how modern technology can learn your boat's actual performance over time, building custom polar diagrams that make routing increasingly accurate. We also discover how over-the-horizon AIS integration allows sailors to plan around fishing fleets or shipping lanes up to 300 nautical miles away – potentially avoiding those nerve-wracking 2AM encounters.

Whether you're planning your first offshore passage or your fiftieth, this episode offers practical insights into using weather technology to sail smarter, safer, and more comfortably. Try these tools on your next passage and experience the confidence that comes from truly understanding what lies ahead.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Weather Navigation
• 8:35 Karen's Sailing Background
• 17:20 PredictWind Forecast Maps & Models
• 30:50 Weather Routing & Departure Planning
• 44:20 Tracking Your Voyage Safely
• 54:25 AIS Integration & Safety Features
• 1:00:12 Karen's Round-the-World Racing Experience

Transcript

Capn Tinsley: 0:05

Tonight we're talking about something every sailor needs to understand weather. If you've ever tossed the lines, you know that understanding forecasts and routing can make the difference between a smooth passage and a rough one. To dig into this, I'm joined by Karen McMaster from New Zealand, from PredictWin. We'll break down the tools, the forecasts and how sailors like you and me can use them to make smarter decisions offshore and prior to leaving the dock. But before we get underway, if you're enjoying this sailing content, please like, subscribe and share. It really helps grow the channel. I'm your host, captain Tinsley, of Sailing Vessels, salty Abandoned and Island Packet 320,. And this is the Salty Podcast, episode 76. Please help me. Welcome, karen McMaster. Hello, hello, welcome. Thank you, welcome to the Salty Podcast. Thank you so much. You guys reached out to me and I was thrilled, so we can all use a little education on the latest tools. So we're ready. Yeah, cool.

Keryn McMaster: 1:06

I mean that's our goal with Connect Wind is to make you know, go ahead, just tell me a brief, just introduce yourself.

Capn Tinsley: 1:14

You know who you are, how you got into this, yeah, so I'm Karen.

Keryn McMaster: 1:20

I've been sailing all my life my family's third-generation sailmakers down in New Zealand. My grandfather started it off and I didn't have a choice. I pretty much brought up on boats racing with mum and dad every weekend and then got the opportunity to go offshore sailing, ended up doing two round-the-worlds one with what was the whip red and then the ocean race after that on female teams, which was amazing, and, yeah, and then I've been working for predict one for over nine years now and it's a new zealand based company but we have, you know, support staff all around the world and it staff around the world too. So, yeah, it's an awesome company to be part of, really proactive, really, um, yeah, trying to just always improve the product. We've got a great support team. We only hire sailors. So you know, I was one of the first in the company on support we hire. All my friends have also sailed around the world.

Keryn McMaster: 2:13

So when you come in and talk to us, we're not, you know we know what we're talking about, and we've been out there on the ocean and can actually help, and and we really listen as well. I think we pride ourselves on the fact that people come in and say, oh, what about doing this? And we go back to our team and, yeah, that's a great idea, let's add that.

Capn Tinsley: 2:31

So we're always trying to improve the product. Well, I didn't know all of that, I mean before you guys reached out. I didn't know that PredictWin was New Zealand and I love it, I love it. I didn't know that you were all sailors. This is all great information.

Keryn McMaster: 2:46

Yeah, well, that's where a lot of the key tools that we have have come from. You know, like I took my daughter offshore. She's 17. I took her on her first offshore passage three months ago and helped my brother deliver his Beneteau 62 up to Fiji from New Zealand. So five-day passage pretty rolly, pretty rough, but we, you know, knew that the weather was going to be like that, we were prepared to take it on and and I used all those tools every single day, multiple times a day, to make sure. You know, I'm not. Yeah, I wanted to make sure that my daughter had a good experience. So it was key to understanding the weather, routing the weather, letting her know what was going to be expected along the way. So, yeah, we're actually out there using it in anger, which is very cool.

Capn Tinsley: 3:31

So when you say five days, is that New Zealand to Australia, to?

Keryn McMaster: 3:35

Fiji. So it's about 1,000 nautical miles, but a 62-foot Beneteau can truck along pretty nicely and it was beam the whole way, 25 plus knots. We had a you know, a couple of little knockdowns but we've done a lot of miles in that boat and and we knew from you know I can talk about all this but the weather routing. We've got all these um modeling parameters now so we can model your boat hydrodynamically and then tell you what roll and vertical acceleration and slamming you're going to see, so that I knew that it was going to be a really rolly trip. And you know roll can be quite dangerous as, as we know, to move around the boat and and things. So you know we could prepare the boat.

Keryn McMaster: 4:16

The coffee machine took a tumble, that was a disaster. But, um, you know, we just you can plan all these things and if you, you know the vertical acceleration is a real good indicator of if someone's going to get seasick, you know the boat going up and down, if you know that and you can see that in our system, you can give the people seasickness tablets or decide it's not the right time to go. So, yeah, all of that stuff we don't just, you know, put it out there and then leave it. We're actually using it ourselves and coming back with great feedback that this didn't work properly or we could improve this. So, yeah, it is a great company to work for, and even if I didn't work for Predictland, I would use it. My plan is to buy my own boat and go off sailing around the world at some stage, and Predictland's what I'll use for sure.

Capn Tinsley: 5:02

Well, you could probably just work from the boat while you're sailing around I did that.

Keryn McMaster: 5:07

You know, starlink's made a massive difference to how we can all work and travel and it's awesome. It's amazing I was doing um, I was zooming into a conference call with the ocean race from the middle of the pacific, so it's pretty cool.

Capn Tinsley: 5:22

That's awesome. Okay, so where? Where would you like to start?

Keryn McMaster: 5:27

um, well, we were just talking offline before we started this um podcast about you know your trip, that you've got coming up, and so maybe that's a good place to start and we can look and do some planning and and see what's going to happen and use the tools. You know I haven't actually run that route so I don't know what I'm going to find but but let's do it.

Capn Tinsley: 5:44

Yeah, it's next week, so do you want me to go ahead and pull that up? Yeah, for sure, okay, so here we are. Let's see if I can get it any bigger. Okay, okay, all right. So where do we go from here?

Keryn McMaster: 6:07

So this is like the essence of PredictWind is the forecast maps and everything that you see here. So this is, you're looking at the PredictWind website, but you can also use PredictWind on your phone, on a tablet, on a PC or a Mac, and so PredictWind is is location-based service, so other services will just show you the whole map of the world and you have to sort of push buttons to get in there. The way we do it, we select a location, and the reason we do that is so that you can get really detailed information for that position specifically, and then from that you can build into weather routing and all sorts of other things. So, um, we, you set up a, uh, a location in purd. Is it purita pass, purito pass, purito pass. Yeah, yeah, okay, cool.

Keryn McMaster: 6:53

So then down the left hand side, there's all these different ways you can look at the weather information. So click on daily briefing from the top of the list. So if you've got kids that are sailing every day or you know you're not very good at reading the weather, we break it down into its simplest form. So we've looked at all the weather for you and we're going to tell you what it's going to be. The basic forecast for morning, afternoon, evening, and so here you can see six to nine knots, the temperature, possible chance of showers, calm seas, and that goes out for like seven to ten days. So if you just wanted to jump in here really quickly, daily briefing is awesome and it's not just an average forecast. We're looking so Predictment has six global models, and the reason we do that is because if you just look at one forecast, you know it could be completely wrong.

Keryn McMaster: 7:42

But if you've got six, it's like having six meteorologists sitting around the table and they all have a little bit of a different idea of what the forecast is going to be. But if you get six of them together, you know there will be a consensus. Four of them will be like oh yeah, I think it's going to blow from the southwest, 15 knots. And that's what you're looking for those consensus, so that you can have confidence in the forecast. For those consensus, so that you can have confidence in the forecast.

Keryn McMaster: 8:06

When we do the Brains daily briefing, we look at all of those forecasts, we take out any outliers that might be extreme and then we average it out. So it's a pretty good starting point. Then you could go down. The next one down is the tables. Click on the table and remember this is all for your location there, but you can have multiple locations. I'm a real tables person, so I like to look at the table and then you can really dig into what the forecast is saying.

Keryn McMaster: 8:33

So the first line you're looking at here is the wind speed. You can see those blocks of blue and you know there's six different lines, there are the six different forecast models. So that's what I was saying, the you know the having a different meteorologist sitting around the table. Each one of them has a little bit of a different idea, but here you can see that they're all in consensus, it's all you know. They're all saying sort of eight knots. That gfs is a little bit of an outlier with 12 knots, but in general I'd say you know, for the whole morning it's going to be sort of six, seven, eight knots.

Keryn McMaster: 9:05

And then you can do the same with the wind direction. Like it's compressed there at the moment. It says southwest, but see where it says direction and there's a little drop down arrow just below where your marker is. Just go down a little bit, keep going down to the next their direction and expand that. So click on that. Yep, and so now you've got your six people all sit around the table telling you what direction they think it's going to be and if everyone's and consensus, it's going to be Southwest, south Southwest, seven to ten knots, that's a really good indication that that's what the forecast is is actually going to be. And you can scroll down the table. There's all sorts of different parameters. There's rain, cloud, cape, which is an indication of thunderstorms. If you had cape and rain and lightning, you'd be like there's a serious, some nasty, extreme weather coming through. So, and you know, bear in mind, this is all just for that location. You might then be going down to the Bahamas.

Capn Tinsley: 10:09

You want to check what it's going to be like there. Add another location there and you can jump between.

Keryn McMaster: 10:12

This is what I'd be looking at right here, the wave light, yeah, and so that's just for your spot that you've got there right, just out on the path. So if you want to do weather routing because you've got a passage coming up, then that's a whole other ball game again. So this is just the location stuff. Um, if you scroll down from the main menu, down there, the very left hand side, you can see we've got different ways of viewing everything. So go to maps from there, just at the top there. Yep, now you can look at that same location. But you can see the forecast maps for the next 10 days and you can look at the different parameters. Because you've got that forecast box. You opened it. It was just closed again.

Keryn McMaster: 10:52

So you're looking at the ECMWF forecast at 8km resolution. That's a really high resolution forecast. You get good detail, good accuracy. Ecmwf is great. Now you've scrolled out to the 50k so you get a bigger area, but not so high resolution. So you always want to be looking at the highest resolution forecast if you can, because that's going to give you the most detail. Yeah, um, and then, yeah, you can just keep. There's so many tools. I mean, I could talk for hours, so you need to. What do you want to?

Capn Tinsley: 11:25

know. All right, well, let's go to waves. Yep, that's what we're all. We're all worried about. That we don't want to get, and that is very mild and it's pretty much all Pretty benign.

Keryn McMaster: 11:37

Yeah, so this is the time for me to go, yeah you got into the measuring tool there but yeah so if you do now, you'll go out to the 50k wave and you know you can see out. On the east coast of the states there's um, you know. For example, look at that big storm out of um, you know, to the east of the uh, the muta there. This is our gfdss forecasting, and so you know the world is broken up into areas of the world that meteorologists report on every day, but it's just a massive line of text and so you can click on any of those and get information from the GMDSS forecast. So click on the storm high seas area and it will tell you what actually is in that.

Keryn McMaster: 12:24

So if you scroll down, click on that box where it says storm high seas, this one, yep, and then you're getting the information there about what the storm is, what direction it's moving, any other notice to mariners, information that you would need that's important for your area. So that's called our GMDSS graphical forecast. We've taken the, the word, the written forecast and put it into a graphical form so that you can see it on the map and you can see which way it's traveling towards you. So if you exit out of that box and zoom out a little bit, you know you can see all sorts of different things. You can see ridges, thunderstorm areas, low pressures, cyclones, hurricanes. You know it's pretty important in your area of the world absolutely, so we got a low right here.

Capn Tinsley: 13:14

Yeah, I haven't. I haven't looked at all lately, so I'm waiting to the last minute um the other I actually looked at passageweathercom. Of course this is much better, thank you yeah.

Keryn McMaster: 13:33

So if you keep going down that main menu list, we're still on all the location based stuff. But the GMDZ validation go down to observations is the next sort of big area. Click on observations on that list and then what I really like to do wind observations. Click on that. It's on the top, a little bit yep, and for your area there'll be some wind observations popping up around the place. So these are all ones that we've sourced and the reason that I like this is because you can actually look at what is actually happening now based on the observation, and go back and check the forecast. And if the observation, which is the now time you know what's happening now, and the forecast is what's actually you know it's predicted to happen, if they match, then that gives you a really good indication that the forecast is doing a good job because it's matching what's actually happening now and so then you can base more weight on that forecast model that's got it spot on for the next sort of 12 hours.

Keryn McMaster: 14:33

So that's quite often how I people always say oh, which four? You know you've got six models, which one do I trust. Well, none of them are perfect all of the time. There's no golden rule, like in your area area, you should trust ECMWF. But if you're on the boat or you've got these observations, you can look out and say actually it's blowing 15 knots from the south now and the forecast says it should be blowing 15 knots from the south. So that gives me confidence in the forecast for the next 12 hours, because what's happening now is right, and so then I might put a little bit more weight or trust in that forecast for the next 12 hours and it might say it's going to build to 30 knots. Well, that's giving me an indication that I need to be careful and prepare so that's sort of how I validate what you know forecast to use.

Keryn McMaster: 15:21

Okay, yeah, lots of information, well.

Capn Tinsley: 15:26

I kind of liken it to when there's a hurricane there's always all these the spaghetti models from all the different models from around the world. So you're taking information from many sources, that's good. Exactly yeah.

Keryn McMaster: 15:41

Yeah. So then you know, for going on a passage, you want to head over towards the Bahamas. You want to start doing some weather routing. So we offer departure planning and weather routing. People often ask why do you have both? Well, what you want to do, departure planning can break down the weather over a block of four days and it will look at it for each of the four days. You'll say I want to go from, you know, from your port, to the Bahamas. Give me a four day window to look at, and then I can look at that and say, okay, day one is going to be mostly on the wind, but by day three it's going to be mostly 15 knots and downwind. So day three is the day that I'm going to choose to go. And so that's what you use departure planning for to figure out approximately what day. Once you know that, then you switch over to weather routing and you put in all the details for the day that you want to leave, and then it will give you a really detailed forecast of you know what you're going to see along the way that roll and vertical acceleration and slamming.

Keryn McMaster: 16:41

I was talking about all the wave data. We've actually got even sail crossover charts in there. Now, if you load up your sail, you know, like at 25 knots I'll put in two reefs and a storm jib or whatever. You can put that into our system and it will alert you. Hey, at 3 o'clock in the morning you're going to need to change sails because I'm seeing 30 knots come through.

Keryn McMaster: 17:02

Well, you could do that before it gets dark. So we're putting all of these safety systems in place not to tell you this is what you have to do, but it's just warning you that the router is seeing this. It's expecting the wind to build. Your sail crossover chart says at this point you would change sails. So here's an indication of what's going to happen. Tell your crew early and let's let's put three reefs in the main at six o'clock at night and have some dinner early and make sure everything's strapped down because we know at 11 o'clock at night you know it's going to hit the fan right, okay, it's going to hit the fan, right okay I've been there okay, this is perfect right here for me to go down the west coast of florida.

Keryn McMaster: 17:46

So yeah, um. So if you want to do a wither out, I don't know whether you want me to switch to my um, my screen, yeah, sure, sure I can?

Capn Tinsley: 17:56

I could take mine off and um. Do you want? To go ahead and put yours up there. I'll wait for you to, and we've got some people watching. If anybody has any questions, um, and apparently they're available for questions a lot, and how is that? Just email or chat through the support, or how does that work?

Keryn McMaster: 18:20

yeah, through um. So our support, team support at predictwincom and I said we've got a big team there, all sailors. We've also got like an AI bot that you might come into first Now. That answers a lot of the very basic questions really well. But always just say talk to a person. If you don't get the answer you want, just write and type talk to a person and it will get straight through to us and we, okay, we answer every question so you can always get to us.

Keryn McMaster: 18:47

So can you see my screen there? I can, okay, cool, so what I've done here is I um, we talked earlier about sort of where you're planning on going and the biggest thing to do is it's all very well to put in a start and finish point, but if we don't know your boat, you could be on my brother's 62 foot beneteau and it'll take you, you know, a few days to get here. Or you could be on your 35, for it it will take you, I don't know 10 days. So you need to know, you need to tell our system what your boat is, and that's called boat polars, and so in here. So I'm in the main menu, I'm in sail routing and I'm going to routing preferences and what I want to do is set up the system. I can set it up for the fastest time or comfort.

Keryn McMaster: 19:30

I could, you know, avoid different amounts of roll or um things, but we'll keep it on fastest for now and we've got all these predefined boats that you can choose. So I'm 32, 32. So let's go for it. We'll go for a 30-foot sailboat. But I did have a look at the list. There is no island packet in here. But if we don't have your boat in the list, you can either get the polars from the designer and give them to us and we'll add it to the list, or you can choose something similar to your boat from the list, or we've got these generic ones in here. So we'll just put in a 30 foot boat for now.

Capn Tinsley: 20:07

Okay, it's really 33, but that's fine.

Keryn McMaster: 20:10

Better be safe, right yeah, yeah, exactly, um, and it will generate this polar curve. And so this is. You know the graphical way of looking at your polars and this can be edited. You can make advanced polars and things like that. You can tell the system you're going to motor if the wind gets too slow. You can tell the system. You know you might have a? Um, a beneteau 50, but that's not in the list and there's only a beneteau 45. Well, you know you'll sail a little bit faster than that, so you can change your polar speed up or down to adjust to it. But anyway, this is the most important thing that you need to tell our system, um, and then you know we're talking about the wave polar. It's really important that you put in the um, the displacement and the length and the beam, so once that's all in there, then our system can calculate that role and vertical acceleration.

Keryn McMaster: 21:00

Um, we've also got depth avoidance, so we've got um. We've also got depth avoidance, so we've got depth contours built into the system. So if you say to avoid two meters of depth, that's what it will do. It will take you around everywhere. But I know that the Bahamas is pretty shallow in places, so I would probably do land, so it will avoid land but it may take you over some shallow spots. You have to adjust the For navigation. You've got to adjust your check it out properly. This isn't a navigation system as such. Tidal and ocean currents the Gulf Stream is massive on the east coast of the States. I've sailed across it and been in it many times, so that's huge. So you want that in your routing as well, so that it's all taken into account. So all these things you just set up once and this is what I was saying the sail crossovers you can go in here. You can either import We've got again a list of all the different boats or you can build your own. So I've got a Beneteau First 47.7 in here at the moment.

Keryn McMaster: 22:01

Once you've done all that, then you can just simply move your star and finish waypoints to wherever and then you click on calculate up here and it does it all for you. So the old school way of doing it was that you had to download all the grid files to your computer and so you'd have to go in, choose which ones you wanted, choose what resolution, choose what size. We're trying to make it simple, especially when you're at sea and you're rolling around, single-handing too, exactly so you want to, um, you know just it's. We give you all the tools. You set it up, push, go and then you get all the results for you to look at. Now these results aren't a roadmap, like. We're not saying you must go this way. You still have to go in and review it, all based on you know what you know of your boat, your crew, your ability. But all the information is there.

Keryn McMaster: 22:51

So I run this route and I've told it, um, just to avoid land, so it may have gone through some shallow areas and we can change that, we can make it go further down around the keys if need be. But so we've got, you know, these six tracks, which are the six different forecast models. We've got your six meteorologists sitting around the table saying, well, I think you should go this way, well, I think you should go that way. But again, we're looking for the consensus and all of them are saying pretty much straight down and around, like the forecasts are all agreeing, because all of the lines they're all sort of in agreement of what you should do, and what I like to do is go into the tables here should do and what I like to do is go into the tables here, so that's the route, with the map overlaid on it, just so that you can see the visual. You know visual map.

Keryn McMaster: 23:35

But the tables data is golden because, instead of doing it on the old school way on your computer, we've told the predict one server to look at all your information and all our weather forecast at the highest resolution, with the the most. You know, the best tides and the best wind and everything, to generate this routing package for you for this particular time, and so you can go in here. If you're a graph person, you can look at it in graphical view and you can see that the wind for the whole passage is really sort of only 10 knots, maybe building a little bit at the end. So something to be aware of. But you know, in four days time that forecast possibly has changed and you're updating your forecast every 12 hours, so you should go today. Yeah, um, and direction and true wind angles. So there's, bear with me, there's lots of data in here.

Capn Tinsley: 24:30

What I want to go down to is that, as far as it goes, september 29th well, that's right now.

Keryn McMaster: 24:36

So yeah, so it's predicting that, based on your 30 foot sailboat, with the forecast, if you left right now, it would take you, you know, five days, and that's where you'd be at the end of the route so this is based around the route that's the forecast, like in the bahamas, or something that very exactly at the end yep, and so here we've got. This is the roll. You know that. You know we say anything more than four degrees of roll is difficult to move around the boat.

Keryn McMaster: 25:03

Well, there's very little roll for the first part, which makes sense because we looked at that wave forecast before and there was nothing, until you get out the other side and then it skyrockets, so that you know you're going to tell your crew by the end of the passage. It's going to get pretty rolly at the end, but not for too long. It's just the end of the passage and again the vertical acceleration, so no one's going to be seasick for the first three days.

Capn Tinsley: 25:24

You've got someone here saying they love. You've got someone on the screen here. I love PW, it's fantastic.

Keryn McMaster: 25:31

Yeah, great, great to hear, yeah, and again the slamming. So all of these forecasts are all lining up to say, well, the first, you know, the first three quarters of the route is going to be great, but when you get out here it's going to get a bit nasty. And so the reason you want to know that, prepare your, prepare your crew and um, and know that it's only going to be for a short time and yeah, and so then the other thing I like in the tables when you're planning routes if you go to the summary you can see here this is again your six meteorologists all sitting around the table with their opinions, but they're all saying that it's, you know, going to take us about four, four and a half days, four days and the maximum wind speed we're going to see here and the time up wind like we're not going to spend much time up wind mostly reaching and a little bit of downwind. So that's, you know, just without really digging into it, that's looking pretty good and most of the time in between 8 and 20 knots you know none of this up in the 30 40 knot range. So that again, there's stuff to look at, to know.

Keryn McMaster: 26:34

Okay, this is going to be a pretty good passage for the time that we're going with the boat that we've got and the conditions that we've got for now and you can look at all sorts of you know you can look at dig into the wave the primary, the secondary, the tertiary. We know that you can get those really mixed waves if you've got a system out to the east that's doing that ground swell but then you've got a wind swell or chop on top of it, it can become really messy. That might be why you want to dig into the different primary, secondary, tertiary swells. The current's a big one for that um, you know the gold stream. So towards the end you'll see if we go back to the map and let's look at that current.

Keryn McMaster: 27:14

So I'm back on the map here I'm going to go down to my forecast options and I want to look at the currents and I want to look at the murkay tour and here you go, so you're cooking into the Merkei Tor and here you go, so you're hooking into the Gulf Stream that cruises up here, and so you know that as you come around the corner here, this is, you know where do you cross the Gulf Stream and at what time, and you know you're crossing it quite hard here and that's where that vertical acceleration and slamming and roll all came in is right around here. So again, just another way to see that you know you need to prepare the boat and the crew.

Keryn McMaster: 27:56

So, um, yeah or wait, I'll be waiting at key baskeen waiting for that right yeah exactly.

Keryn McMaster: 28:01

And so what? You know, every 12 hours of forecast updates as your boat moves down the track, you'd be like, okay, well, now I'm here and I'm going to run that route again and it'll change. The forecast change as it stands out. You know, any forecast is only realistically good four to five days out. Then it becomes a little bit iffy. So you'll quite often see that the first two or three days of the routing aligns and then those routes will sort of spread out as the different forecasts become less accurate and do crazy things. So one thing we would yeah, is there anything else you want to talk about with the routing there that you see, or we have a comment far better to go to the quays than stage the crossing from there.

Keryn McMaster: 28:44

So yeah, so I don't know this and what you could do, like if you knew that you could put in a waypoint and say like so I'm in the waypoints box here now and I can put in a, an intermediate waypoint which has just dropped this little dot here in the middle, and I can pull that down.

Keryn McMaster: 29:00

I say okay, well, we're going to go out to the keys here and then, and then we're going to go across, and I can even make that a a port waypoint. I can round it to port so that you know that you know you're going to come around the bottom of it instead of trying to go exactly to it. You can also put in a boundary, like you could say okay, I want to create a boundary around the keys and so I'm going to put a little area in here.

Capn Tinsley: 29:24

We're going to go through. I want to avoid that.

Keryn McMaster: 29:32

Okay, and here we're going to go through. I want to avoid that, okay, so that's just an example. And if you put in that boundary, get out of the exit boundary box. Um, yeah, if you put in that boundary, then the router will respect that boundary and it will take you around it. So if you knew that there was an area that you really wanted to avoid, you could put in that boundary, which is pretty cool and you can see how easy it is to to put turn in, and then I can just edit it. Yeah, I can remove it whenever I want so um yeah, okay, so, um, okay.

Capn Tinsley: 30:00

So let's see what's said. Yeah, come to the keys and then cross safely during the best weather window. That's definitely what I'll be doing. I'll be going up to Key Viscayne. I'm going to drop down from Marco down through Marathon, you know, under the Seven Mile Bridge, and then make my way up.

Capn Tinsley: 30:18

Before we go on to the next thing, I want to make one announcement. This has to do with I'm going to be releasing some T-shirts. I'm going to be releasing some t-shirts. I'm going to be opening my own little store and right now I've got I've got my shirt on. Let me take that off. This is a SPF shirt. Let me see, it's got sailor right there. Look at that. And it's got the salty podcast logo and I'm going to show you some pictures.

Capn Tinsley: 30:49

Um, and I'm going to be opening my shopify, and so this is just some pictures of the model on my new store and they're sharp and they come in gray and they do um, they, they come in women's also and I and this the white has has the red sailor on it. And the reason I'm and I get regular t-shirts Bell Canva and the reason I decided to do podcast t-shirts is everybody's got t-shirts for their own boat, but I figured people might want to buy a shirt, you know, with the podcast on it and you know, kind of helps me offset the expenses. I do operate in the red on the podcast. I'm just now getting to monetization, so I thought I'd kind of offset some of my expenses with some really cool t-shirts SPF shirts too. So with that, thank you for your patience. That's coming soon and hope everybody will be excited about it. So, on that, thank you for your patience. That's coming soon and I hope everybody will be excited about it. So on to you want to talk about tracking?

Keryn McMaster: 31:53

Yeah. Tracking is awesome Sorry, you know.

Capn Tinsley: 31:59

Let me just say I saw sailing with Phoenix and I haven't been sailing on my boat since a in a, since 2000,. Late 2023, I haven't taken a long trip, so I didn't know that you could track on, predict when maybe you could do it before then. I didn't know. I use an in-reach explorer. Um, oh so okay, the t-shirts look great. I wanted to get that out there. Um, so, tell us how that's done. I saw sailing with phoenix. He, he gave everybody the, the link and and I just really liked it and I'd like no more to know more about that yeah, so tracking is a massive part of what we do.

Keryn McMaster: 32:36

It's a real big safety feature and it's nice to be able to share your story and um and put it into your, your blogs or whatever you're doing.

Keryn McMaster: 32:44

So what we do if you tell us your boat name, we will create a tracking page for you. Specifically, you know a url specific to your boat and then you also tell us how we can track your boat so we can track your boat with multiple devices and inreach, solio, iridium, go um. You can do it manually or we've got a product that we sell called the data hub, which is awesome, and the data hub connects into your n2k network, your nmea network, on your boat. You plug it in and then we can get the position from your chart plotter and it can get sent to predict wind and we can update your tracking page that way. The cool thing about the data hub is, when you have it connected into your n2k network, we can also show the wind speed and direction. So I'm going to share a screen with you. This is my brother, so this is what we did when we went to Fiji, so just bear with me. Entire screen, take your time.

Capn Tinsley: 33:44

We're sailors, we move slow.

Keryn McMaster: 33:48

Sorry, can you see that?

Capn Tinsley: 33:52

Yes, okay, okay.

Keryn McMaster: 33:54

So this is my brother's boat and he doesn't mind me sharing this with everyone, so he's in Fiji at the moment, and so this is the URL that we created for him. So we do this in the back end of our system.

Capn Tinsley: 34:07

Let me take off my overlay so we can see that.

Keryn McMaster: 34:09

Oh yeah okay, so up in the top, basically, we'll create you a url you can share with your family and friends yeah, got it.

Capn Tinsley: 34:18

Yes, I salty abandon. That's what it is, yeah so we'll.

Keryn McMaster: 34:23

We'll set you up after and we can track you to start with your Garmin Enriched, but we'll get you a data hub and you can plug that in as well. So, yeah, what I was saying is, so you can set it to track hourly, you send the position reports back to us and then we update it on this page. And so this is my brother's boat. We can see speed. I think he's just drifting around the bay at the moment, but the cool thing here is that I can also see his true direction and true wind speed and so on passage. This was really good to see. My mum follows us all the time. One of the guys I work with, nick. He saw that you know up about here. We um, we had been doing nine knots the whole way and all of a sudden we were only doing four and he actually messaged me on the boat and said, are you all right?

Keryn McMaster: 35:09

and I'm like, yeah, we just had a big knock, knock down. You know, we're just cleaning everything up, including the coffee machine and things and we can blog about it here. So I actually, you know, said it said here that the coffee machine so if somebody's tracking you, they can click on it.

Capn Tinsley: 35:22

Go no worries we're just cleaning up the coffee.

Keryn McMaster: 35:26

Yeah, and we've had cases where people have you know someone's contacted us because everything else has gone down, but the tracking was still working and they knew that the boat was okay because it was still moving, but they had no other communications with the boat or it was going backwards and around in circles.

Keryn McMaster: 35:43

You know we've had a couple of those incidences where people have contacted us. We've checked the tracking page and know that it's accurate. There's actually something wrong on the boat. They've sent the coast guard out and there has been a problem. So, yeah, the cool thing about the data hub is that you can get all this information in there as well and it's really accurate tracking. And you know, with Starlink these days, it's great. And if you connect the data hub to the Starlink, even if you're turning the Starlink off at night because of power consumption or you're trying to monitor your usage, the data hub will store those positions offline. The next time you come online it will just upload them all. So it keeps track of everything that's going on.

Keryn McMaster: 36:25

One thing I wanted to show you which is quite impressive. This is predict wind and I'm in the ais data page from the main website. But all these little white dots, these are all predictable boats that we're tracking. So it's massive. Tracking is what we do and it's really cool. At the moment, you know, everyone's starting to come home from fiji or is on, you know, almost home, all these boats around the top of new zealand. Um, the other thing I'd say I is um. Ais is a big part of predict wind, which is what I'm in at the moment. These are all you know. These are fishing fleets and when we were sailing from new zealand up to fiji, knowing that there is fishing fleets coming up that you've got to be prepared for is massive because, as you know, ais is only as good as the vhf range. It's like 15 nautical miles. But if you can see this um and you can also download it into the weather routing, you will know that look at 2 o'clock in the morning, we're going to come across a fishing fleet.

Capn Tinsley: 37:23

That happened to me before.

Keryn McMaster: 37:25

Yeah, let's crack off 10 degrees now, so that we just don't have that drama in the middle of the night. And you know, yeah, we'll go a little bit further. But to save the drama and you know, sometimes these fishing fleets, especially around here I don't know about america they turn off all their lights and the ais.

Capn Tinsley: 37:43

Sometimes it gets a bit scary, you know so, just all that, you know, when they're in bunches like that, it's, it's, it's too, it's too big to go around, and so I had to go through and they didn't like it much, but I went right through it, yeah, and you know it's cool to see all these um, oh, wow, the shipping lanes as well.

Keryn McMaster: 37:59

You know I love I can spend quite a bit of time in here just seeing what, what shipping lanes. But you know, so this is important for you to know because through here you're actually going to come into a big shipping lane as well. So at that time of night you know you're going to need are you doing it on your own? You need to be really careful, do?

Capn Tinsley: 38:13

you. I'll be doing that during the day.

Keryn McMaster: 38:14

Yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. So I mean, tracking's fantastic. I highly recommend the DataHub for that reason alone, but it's got some other cool features as well. You know, we can this again back to the AIS, if you have. I'll just stop sharing my screen. Probably we can just talk about it. If you have the DataHub and you've got it connected to your Starlink, you can set it up so that you can download what we call over-the-horizon AIS and you can see all of those AIS targets out to 300 nautical miles and you can get that onto your chart plotter through the data hub so that you're going up on deck, you're checking not only the boats that are around you but, again, the ones in the future. So, yeah, it's all about safety for us and trying to do the best we can for all our boats Boats out there which you can see there's thousands of them using us.

Keryn McMaster: 39:16

So what you just showed me? The red boats. What's the difference between the red boats and the little other ones? Like with AIS, there's different classifications. There'll beifications, there'll be container ships okay, fishing boats, there'll be pleasure craft, and you can click on each one of them and yeah, I have ais, so yeah, yeah same, exactly the same, but you can get it onto your chart, plotter out into the distance and yeah yeah, and it's nice that they can see you, but not and more and more, wouldn't you say, more and more, even cruising so many people.

Capn Tinsley: 39:43

I mean, I don't, I don't know how it used to be, but, um, so many people have it now. Yeah, oh, it's so important to have the cruising, of course the commercial boats, but also the cruising vessels also.

Keryn McMaster: 39:56

So it's just more and more common that, okay, cool.

Capn Tinsley: 40:01

So yeah, I've got a. No, I didn't hear all, I didn't understand all the steps, but chat GPT should help me through doing all that stuff you said, so I'm excited.

Keryn McMaster: 40:14

Our support team can help you with that. We just I just came off a webinar. Actually, every year we know this time of year people are preparing to go across the Atlantic, so we just did an Atlantic crossing series where we go into depth about how to use the weather, routing, departure planning, our models. So if you come in to support and ask for a recording of those webinars, we can send those out to anybody that wants them.

Capn Tinsley: 40:39

You just did a webinar today, this morning? Yeah, yeah, is that the one that was? Was that the?

Keryn McMaster: 40:46

atlantic. Yeah, so that was part two. So part one we did last week, which was more about our weather models and the routing. This one was more about the data hub, which I've just been talking about tracking using a platform that we had called the Offshore app, which does very similar things to what I've been showing you. But what we're finding with Starlink is it's fantastic, but if it goes down you're in the dark.

Keryn McMaster: 41:12

So if you have an Iridium system or something like that that you can still download weather on, then you can switch from one to the other and you know, for crossing the atlantic that's so important. You could be day five and have completely wiped out your styling. What are you going to do for the next? Um, you know, 20 days. You can switch to the iridium go. You can use our offshore app, which is designed to compress all the files and send it to you. It's slow as heck, but you know you will get the files. Um, and so I think that whole redundancy thing is really important. Um, Starlink don't get me wrong is amazing. I use it, I'll have it on my boat 100, but I will also have something like an iridium that I can use to download weather if it turns to custard.

Capn Tinsley: 41:59

Well, I've got WeatherXM and I've got the InReach and I've got Starlink, and I was debating whether I should. You know, I always pause all those services until I need them. And I was debating whether I should get, because I do like the WeatherXM. It shows up on my chart plotter. So what do you think about those three redundancies? Well, you've got the phone, you've got the predict when and you've got the inReach, you've got the chart plotter with the WeatherXM, which seems like a good idea, and you've got the Starlink.

Keryn McMaster: 42:35

Yeah, I think for what you're doing that's fine, and you know, a lot of the time you'll be in cell coverage as well, so it just depends on how far offshore you're going and what you're doing. The inReach is fine. It's a great tracking device, but you can't download weather using it, so you would have to have someone on shore that you message to say, hey, my Starlink's died. Can you tell me what the weather's going to be for the next day or two? And you need to know that you can trust them, that they understand all that, I think it's got some primitive weather downloads, I think it's not.

Keryn McMaster: 43:07

It's very basic. It's got the GFS, you know. It's just one model. It's very low resolution, there's not much to it. So it's something. And in the old days, that's all we had sailing around the world with taxes.

Capn Tinsley: 43:23

So, and it wasn't that long ago, no, no, well, um, so what have I? What are we? What am I not asking that you think is important for you know?

Keryn McMaster: 43:33

people. I think, um, yeah, I think understanding what we offer the different models and why we've got them all and why it's important not to just stick to one and the resolution of the forecast you know like the resolution is big because you can have look at a map that's 100 kilometre resolution. That means that for every 100 kilometre square I'm giving you one forecast for that whole area and that can change based on know what islands there are. Are you in the lee shore of an island or on you know what's going on there. But when you reduce the resolution down to 50k or 8k or in a lot of areas, one kilometer resolution, all of a sudden you get to see you know all of those, the funneling through between islands and the lee shores and how wind moves around islands and things. That's so important to understand that and you can actually get a different forecast for the same area based on resolution.

Keryn McMaster: 44:31

So most high resolution forecasts only go out sort of 36 hours and then it extends out, it changes resolution. But always be looking at the best data you can find and that's why in PredictWin we've got all these different models at really high resolutions so that you can make the best decisions for your boat. So I think that's pretty important to understand that and to know how to change those resolutions and how to change the models. A lot of people, when they first start using predict one, don't understand any of that. So when you're on the maps, you can change between the different forecast options. We've got wind and cloud and gust and cape, and you shouldn't even just be looking at wind, you should be looking at all of them together. Waves, looking between the maps, the mats yeah, waves is so important. It's more important than a wind and a lot of times because you could sail in 30 knots in flat water, but 30 knots with four meter seas it's a completely different story.

Capn Tinsley: 45:31

so, yeah, yeah, if it's wind that's coming off the land, there's a good chance that the water's calm In a north wind. Here on the northern Gulf Coast. The Gulf is flat and it's like I call it, the crack high. That's the perfect situation. You know, you've got 20 knots and you're just boogieing down the beach, you know, on your boat, yeah, no, I would highly recommend you know, know, getting to use the routing tools.

Keryn McMaster: 45:58

It's not something that you, you know. Like any new program, it takes a little bit of time to learn it and understand it. So don't, don't leave it until you're throwing the lines off the dock and then wondering what you're going to do. It's pretty important, you know, and that's a, it's a massive asset and it's the people on the boat are really valuable. So you want to get it right, so you've got to spend a bit of time doing it and that's why our support team's there. We, we know, we've used it, done it, happy to help share our experiences, and you even get little extra tidbits from you know, smiley, one of the guys. He's he's a salty old sea dog and he'll talk to you on the phone and then he'd also tell you that every you know, if you got spinnaker up every 12 hours you have have to rock the halyard so that there's no chafing and things like that.

Capn Tinsley: 46:39

So you get all these extra little bits and pieces? Did they ever say, are you crazy?

Keryn McMaster: 46:44

Yeah, why did you leave the dog? I'd love to say that sometimes.

Capn Tinsley: 46:51

You can say it to me. Okay, feel free. So what can we talk about? Cost?

Keryn McMaster: 47:02

What's the cost for the subscription? Um, yeah, so there's three different levels of subscription. Um, so the basic is, you know, if you're just cruising around the coast um basic levels us 29 for the year and that gives you I think I think we're up to 16 locations and all sorts of you know save locations, like what we were doing, looking at all the forecast stuff for that.

Keryn McMaster: 47:19

And then if you want to go up to weather routing, departure planning, having all those extra bits and pieces standard or professional level. So standard is $249 US for the year and that gives you the options to weather routing and tracking and all of that. Any weather route you run will include ocean data in it and the highest resolution forecasts that we can find all done on our server. It's cloud-based, but if you want to see and really dig into that wave data, the roll, the vertical acceleration, the slamming, you need to have that professional level and I like. So that's 499 us for the year and I think it's money well spent because you only have to have a couple of situations where you get into some bad seas and all your family's hating you because you've taken them out of it. Um, yeah, you're not going to get them back on the boat because that professional level is, um, it's pretty important so.

Capn Tinsley: 48:17

So, hayden, somebody's watching and been commenting. Which plan do you have? If anybody's watching, just go ahead, and we do have some people watching. I'd like to hear what people are using, especially Hayden, sb Island Spirit, because he's felt ready to go back to the. I can't remember if it's St Martin. Your boat is St Martin or, sorry, hayden, I don't remember.

Keryn McMaster: 48:53

But they spend six months in the Caribbean, so I'd be interested to hear what he gets. And you can drop up and down between levels if you want to, but you know, if you're always trying to look at passage planning or you're planning your next adventure, you know you just keep it going. Yeah, it's definitely worth it.

Capn Tinsley: 49:08

He has the mid-level plan. He's been using it for 10 years.

Keryn McMaster: 49:13

Yeah, and you know that standard level is a great mid-plan and, like I said, all the routing, the ocean currents included in it. But you know, for crossing the Gulf Stream, I think it's pretty important to be able to see that information, see those ocean currents figure out where you're going to cross, where you might see wind against tide. That's going to be pretty choppy, all that extra stuff.

Capn Tinsley: 49:35

Well, the rule of thumb with that is there's no, absolutely no type of north wind. Do we cross the gulf stream from miami? Yeah, that's a no-no, certain way we wait and keep this game. What a great place to wait right. Have you?

Keryn McMaster: 49:52

you've been there, obviously have you um, I've I've sailed out of florida, miami but, and yeah, been in the gulf stream a few times. You know we sailed up the coast, sailing around the world and stuff yeah, so we have a few minutes left.

Capn Tinsley: 50:07

I'd like to hear about that. I want to hear about a little bit about your sailing um, oh.

Keryn McMaster: 50:13

So I've just come back from the uk. I just did the fast net race on a 42 footer, which I don't know what. I was thinking that was a bad idea. But yeah, there was the Admiral's Cup and the Fastnet in Cowes just not that long ago, so I raced on that, which was pretty cool. The Fastnet was three and a half days sitting on the rail pretty much the whole time, and it was drier outside the boat than inside because it was a little. It was a gp42 which was pretty low freeboard and lots of waves coming over the whole time, so that was fun. Yeah, but I started off. I got the opportunity to fly to Sweden in 1998 in trial for the women's around the world race, which was the last whip read around the world, and so we did that. So nine months, um, nine different leagues.

Capn Tinsley: 51:03

Tell me about that race. What are the? Is it a retro race? What is it a solo? What is it?

Keryn McMaster: 51:09

it's so. It's fully crewed and at the time it was in the whip read 60, so 60 foot racing yachts, um, and it's still going. You know there is another iteration of the race planned in two years time. It's still going. You know, there is another iteration of the race plan just for in two years time. It's now called the ocean race, but it went from the whip red to the volvo ocean race, now the ocean race. So when I did the first one it was still the whip red, started in england, sailed to cape town and then it was broken down into legs. So we went cape town, freemantle, auckland, brazil, miami, uh, and then across, back across so these are just checkpoints.

Keryn McMaster: 51:45

It's non-stop yeah no it wasn't, so you'd stop in each port so you'd trace. The longest time at sea was 34 days, which was from the uk to cape town. We only planned on 28 days but we got stuck in the doldrums. So yeah, that was not that much fun and ran out of food and things.

Capn Tinsley: 52:04

Oh no.

Keryn McMaster: 52:04

And then in each port you'd stop for a couple of weeks, pull the boat out, check everything and then get ready to go into the Southern Ocean.

Capn Tinsley: 52:10

That's the way to go is to be able to stop for a couple of weeks.

Keryn McMaster: 52:15

It was pretty nice. Yeah, some of the bondi globe where they go around non-stop. They're super impressive, you know, single-handed non-stop. But um, yeah, this was pretty hard, the golden globe race.

Capn Tinsley: 52:27

Yep, the single-handed no bigger than 36 or 38 feet, yeah I've had a couple of those folks on, uh, the one, the girl that won, and another one that's going to be in it in 2026.

Keryn McMaster: 52:43

yeah.

Capn Tinsley: 52:44

Kirsten, oh my gosh, amazing, so tough, you know, and I'm talking about being, how long were you in the Southern Ocean?

Keryn McMaster: 52:54

uh, so at any. So the legs were, you know, from Cape Town to Sydney. So I think it was like two and a half, three weeks and we dived down pretty deep. They had ice gates so we weren't allowed to go so far south, depending on where the icebergs were. But you are dodging growlers, the iceberg chunks that come off, and so quite often you'd be on watch and then within that watch you'd have people standing up at the shrouds on growler watch if you knew that you were going through a bit of an ice field and, yeah, it's snowing on deck and it was pretty miserable. I sent messages to my mum saying, if I ever do this again, show me this fax at the time telling me not to do it. And then I said I was going to do it a second time and she brought the faxes out saying look, you promised me you'd never do this again.

Capn Tinsley: 53:43

Oh, it wasn't that bad, I'll be fine. Oh, it's like I guess it might be like having a baby, it wasn't that? Bad yeah well, the last um gentleman that I interviewed, that he spent four and a half months in the southern ocean and and as he was coming out of it, you know, as he was leaving, he goes. I'm never going back there again.

Keryn McMaster: 54:02

I think everyone sees it in the Southern Ocean.

Capn Tinsley: 54:06

When I think of sailing, I think of sun. That's what I like. But I've also interviewed people that only like the spalboard or what's that southern tip of South America. They love ice and sleet. Are you that kind of gal? I am a little bit.

Keryn McMaster: 54:27

The windier it gets, the more I love being on the boat. If there's nothing the doldrums it's the worst place to be. But the Southern Ocean it's cold and it can be wet, but it's also the most amazing sailing. You know massive, big, rolling swell that you can surf down and it's yeah, it's, it's cool down there okay, you're a beast.

Capn Tinsley: 54:49

Okay, maybe I'll have you back on the podcast and we'll talk about your last time around the world, okay, you back on the podcast and we'll talk about your last time around the world.

Keryn McMaster: 55:01

Okay, yeah, yeah, lots of freeze-dried. Uh, no, nothing exotic, you know, no showers, nothing like that.

Capn Tinsley: 55:09

So yeah, well, when it's really cold like that. It's not what you think of, right? You don't think of showers, um, so is there anything else that any you want people to know? Any kind of uh, we've covered a lot of features, is anything new that we maybe haven't mentioned? I'm just trying to think, um, and where do the people go to sign up? Go to predictwincom. They can also follow you on instagram, right is that?

Keryn McMaster: 55:40

it. Yeah, and facebook, um, yeah, the website. You can just log in and if you haven't created a registration, and then you, straight away, you get um, you know, access to all the free forecasts. You can add a couple of locations. You don't have to go any further than the free. If you don't want to, you can just get a, you know, just get really accurate forecasts for where you live. But, um, if you want to add more locations and look at things like the observations and tracking and all of that, then you start going up the levels. But, yeah, I just really encourage anyone to reach out to our support team. If there's anything that you don't understand, we're more than happy to help. Um, if there's any features that you think would be a good asset for predict one, we're also keen to hear about those too.

Capn Tinsley: 56:22

So, yeah, we're always trying to improve what we offer can we get you to um to add island packets to the list?

Keryn McMaster: 56:30

yeah, so I we. Yes, if you can get us the polars, I can add them, so you'd have to go I. I can have a look online. If I can see it was an Island Packet 320, eh 320, yeah. And.

Capn Tinsley: 56:44

I talk to a lot of Island Packet folks in the community because I have an Island Packet. So you don't have Island Packets in the list. We definitely need to talk about that.

Keryn McMaster: 56:54

We've got some. I looked We've got a couple, just not not the 320. So if you can find that, it's a 1998 community? Yeah, then we can for sure add it. It's.

Capn Tinsley: 57:05

That's easy, we just need the data okay, well, um hayden, if he's still watching, he'll know what you just said, that you need the pollers. I don't know what that is. I'll have to ask chat gpt what that is. But is it basically just all the data, all the uh, the specifications for the boat?

Keryn McMaster: 57:26

it's. It's how your boat will sail in any given wind condition. So like what speed will your boat do in 15 knots of wind at 90 degree true wind angle? So so when you're reaching in 15 knots, is your boat going to do six knots? Well then we put that into a chart and then, at 20 knots, what speed will it do At five knots? What will it do when you go off to a B-map and broad reach, 150 true wind angle, what speed is your boat going to do? And so it builds this polar curve and then from there our router can figure out how fast your boat's going to move through the different weather systems and put you in the right spot at the right time for that weather. And you can see why that's so important, because your boat's so different to my brother's boat, and that's really important to know, because if you're not in the right weather system at the right time, all the information you're getting from us is going to be wrong. So you've got to set those things up.

Capn Tinsley: 58:20

I can definitely sound this. This is amazing. So Hayden says we have all the pollers for every IP yacht.

Keryn McMaster: 58:27

Great. So if you can send them to us, we'll load them into the system and then they'll be available to everybody. And you know, you just select the predefined poller, scroll down in the list to ip320, and then our router will use those and be way more accurate than a 30 foot sailboat that I put you on for now that is so awesome, okay, so how does he get this to you?

Keryn McMaster: 58:53

to send it to support at predictwindcom and um and say attention, karen from the podcast, please load these pollers into the system and then just give us those. We really need them in like a csv. We can't really get them just from a pdf, so if you could convert them into some sort of csv file, that would.

Capn Tinsley: 59:11

Let me, let me, okay, support at predictwindcom. Attention Karen, yeah, okay, hey, hayden, can you do that before this weekend? So, yeah, this is an island packet expert right here, right there, awesome, okay, and um, also, uh, sailing zippity says that the hub collect this information yes, it does.

Keryn McMaster: 59:49

So the really cool thing about the data hub is it can create your own set of custom pollers. So if you plug it into, you, plug the data hub into your n2k network, then it will look at how you're sailing, the wind conditions, the wave conditions, and it will send all of that information back to predict wind. We know that you've got an island packet 320, but then you sail it like you know. You sail it this way. Then we'll start building you a polar diagram specific to the way you sail the boat and over time that will become more and more accurate and um, and then your routing will become more accurate and you'll have, you know, more accurate information for each passage. So, yeah, that's the data hub is very cool for that um yeah, this is really doing a lot of work for you this is really doing a lot of work for you.

Keryn McMaster: 1:00:38

Yeah, it is so.

Capn Tinsley: 1:00:39

Hayden says, yes, he's going to send you that information and he is the man for that information. Okay, do we have any other questions? Anybody out there? Let's give them a minute. So thank you, hayden, for doing that quickly, like tomorrow.

Keryn McMaster: 1:01:00

There's the email, if you've got Starlink, we can update a little along the way. So that's one of the beauties of Starlink these days.

Capn Tinsley: 1:01:07

Yeah, pretty sure my polars will improve. We are starting our cruising life next year. We've got plenty of time, okay.

Keryn McMaster: 1:01:14

And we use AI, artificial intelligence, to build those polars too. So if you are sailing and then all of a sudden you catch a fish and you slow down and you turn around because you're trying to pull it in or you know you started motoring for whatever reason, then AI will look at that and say, oh, we're going to exclude that data because that's not how you normally sail. So there's like a range of it figures out when you're motoring, when you're anchoring, it figures out when you're motoring when you're anchored, and it will only use the best data when it can find it.

Capn Tinsley: 1:01:44

So it's a very clever little box, okay.

Keryn McMaster: 1:01:47

And so what kind of account did you just create for me? I put you on the pro level. You've got to know when it's going to get nasty around that corner.

Capn Tinsley: 1:01:55

So that is the $29 package.

Keryn McMaster: 1:01:59

No, that's the professional, the $4.99 for the year.

Capn Tinsley: 1:02:02

Wow, all right, do I get to keep it? Yes, you do. Yeah, yes, that's a little gift for having you on the podcast, right?

Keryn McMaster: 1:02:11

Yeah, I'm more than happy to do that for you, absolutely Thank you.

Capn Tinsley: 1:02:14

Thank you so much. Okay, so now I'm really going to be singing your praises. So, um anything else. I'm just trying to wait and see if any any other comments come in. Um anything else you want us to know. That is some great things. I have learned so much just in this hour, uh, but.

Keryn McMaster: 1:02:32

I'm going to. I mean sorry, there's so much I could talk about, but I'll just yeah.

Capn Tinsley: 1:02:38

Well, maybe we'll have a part two during my trip. Absolutely, yeah, I'll be doing this from the.

Keryn McMaster: 1:02:42

Bahamas yeah, I'd love to see you in the Bahamas and we can talk about how your trip was and what you found good and and what we need to improve, or you know how your pollers went, what the forecasts were like. All of that would be great to hear okay, all right.

Capn Tinsley: 1:02:55

Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you. I don't know if it was you that reached out to me. I can't remember. It might have been.

Keryn McMaster: 1:03:02

Ellie, I think it was our social media.

Capn Tinsley: 1:03:04

Okay, well, that was just whose idea? Was that, by the way, to start reaching out to the podcasters?

Keryn McMaster: 1:03:10

We've got some amazing social media team now we're really working hard on getting out there to everybody. So, yeah, they're promoting us a lot and trying to get you know the people in the team that actually use the product to talk about it, because that's the best endorsement for it when you've actually taken your daughter offshore in rough weather and it's all been okay.

Capn Tinsley: 1:03:33

I'm going to have two cats with me. I don't have children, but I have cats. Good luck. Well, it's going to be more important than ever to go in calm conditions. You know, I don't want to take them offshore when it's all crazy no, not at all. You don't want to ski them, no, all right. Well, thank you so much. What a pleasure it has been to talk to you. You're welcome. There's going to be a follow-up so cool I look forward to it.

Capn Tinsley: 1:04:02

All right, and I will email you about creating my page. Is that what I need to do? My, okay, my tracking okay.

Keryn McMaster: 1:04:09

I just need name and how are you gonna? Um, if you're going to use the inReach for now until I send you a data hub, I just need to know the details of that so we can tap into it and get your position reports.

Capn Tinsley: 1:04:23

Okay, so what do I send you from the inReach? What do I send?

Keryn McMaster: 1:04:27

You need the track feed. Yeah, I'll send you some information, okay. Yeah, then we can just grab that data from inReach and put it onto your page. Okay.

Capn Tinsley: 1:04:38

All right. Well, thank you so much, and until we meet again, and with that I'll say, salty Abandon out. Yeah, thank you.