Version 1.6 - Flood Tide Notifications

I’ve mentioned before that the idea of Big Buoy came from me working on a product for a Fortune 50 company. The real theme of the product I designed for that company was being able to set rules to predict when a vessel was going to have an issue, before it did. We did this by allowing a user to set conditions that when hit, caused the user to look into what was going on. In fishing terms, that would look like “If the wind is 15mph out of the west, it is good”.

How does that relate to Big Buoy? Well we have the alerts tab. This admittedly needs a lot of work to make it more user friendly. But right now, a user can set conditions on a spot and when it hits those conditions, it’s marked as good. Right now, all free users can do this. I might eventually add some price wall to it but I’m not ready to yet.

Version 1.6 adds the ability to set a configuration on tide height. What this means is that you can forecast out those big flood tide days a little bit easier. The interface also highlights the biggest flood tide for the month. Right now, it’s just based off maximum height and it does not factor wind or storm into the formula. Eventually I’d love to do that, especially considering the weather we had on the east coast last weekend (nor’easter). I’m also toying around with the idea of doing a minimum height. This would definitely need to account for negative tides so it’s on hold for right now.

Give it a shot and let us know what you think. And if you don’t know how a big tide affects your fishery, this is a good thing to watch. A lot of water definitely will cause fish to do different things.

-Charlie