Boating Conditions for Overthinkers

Reading this page

• Where these numbers come from, and what they are not. There is no Coast Guard wind or sea limit for recreational boats — the USCG regulates equipment, documentation and conduct, not whether a day is pleasant. The one official line is the National Weather Service’s Small Craft Advisory: sustained winds between 20 and 33 knots, or seas above a height set per region, for conditions “that might be hazardous to small craft”. The 10 knots and 1 foot used here sit at roughly half that wind and a fraction of that sea. They are a comfort threshold for a small motor yacht, not a safety one.
• So read the colors accordingly. Green is comfortable: up to 10 kt and 1 ft. Yellow is workable — past comfortable, nowhere near hazardous. Orange is getting serious for a small boat: past 18 kt or 4 ft. Red is advisory range, and a day also goes red whenever NWS has an actual Small Craft Advisory or worse in effect for this zone — their declaration beats any number here. Grey is beyond the model's reach. Nothing on this page knows your boat, your crew or your experience, and green is worth considering, never permission. Read the live product before anything above green: NWS PZZ135 and current warnings.
• Every day gets a full tile, in date order, today first. Each shows conditions at four points through the day, the day's peak wind against the suggested 10-kt limit, the full tide curve with all four turns, and sun, daylight, moon and rain totals.
• This page is generated by a script on the server, not written by hand. The numbers come straight from the sources below; the prose is assembled from the same numbers by rule. Where it reads a little flat, that is why.
• The harvest table is verified by hand, not scraped. It was last checked on 14 Sep 2026. The WDFW rule feed is read every run, and if anything new mentions this water a banner appears above the table — but the table itself does not change until a human updates it.
• Tides are exact for all 14 days — they're astronomical, not forecast. The shaded band on each chart is daylight, sunrise to sunset.
• Sea state is estimated from wind over Possession Sound's short fetch. The zone forecast's "2 ft or less" floor is too coarse to score against a 1-foot threshold, so light-wind days are refined from wind speed. Where the zone forecast gives a harder wave number, that number wins. Wind is also weighted by the fetch of the direction it comes from — the same speed builds a bigger sea with twenty miles of open water behind it than with one.
• Confidence drops as you go down the page. The bar under each heading shows roughly how much to trust that block. The last days carry no wind guidance at all — their tiles show the tide, which is exact, and nothing that pretends to be a forecast.
• Zone forecast issued 132 AM PDT Mon Sep 14 2026. Its day names are mapped from its own issuance date, not today's, so a stale product can't silently shift the week.
• Model run 2026-09-14T09:15:55Z. Beyond about day three the data is 6-hourly, which in Pacific time lands on 5 AM, 11 AM, 5 PM and 11 PM — the four columns each tile shows. Nothing is interpolated.
• Currents are trolling information, not a go/no-go factor. They come from NOAA station PUG1515 bin 15, and this water runs slack — well under a knot at every stage of every tide in the run. That is too little to build wind-against-tide chop, so current is deliberately not fed into the day ratings. What it is good for is the gap between speed over ground and speed through water when you are trolling, and knowing when the water goes still.