39 years guiding PWC · Marco Island · Florida
Capt. Ron Hagerman has been guiding personal watercraft through the 10,000 Islands, Marco Island, and the Southwest Florida coast since 1987 — nearly four decades on the water. This app captures the local knowledge, safety rules, and go/no-go doctrine he’s built over 39 years of running captains through some of the trickiest inshore water in the state.
Ron has spent nearly four decades reading tides, wind, and weather in the 10,000 Islands. He’s the guy other captains call when they want to know whether a day is safe to run — and he’s built a reputation across Florida’s PWC community for straight talk, safety-first calls, and putting no ego between a captain and the honest answer.
This app was built to bottle that judgment: every rule, every threshold, every “never follow a falling tide into water you don’t know” came from Ron directly. It’s not AI-generated advice — it’s Ron’s doctrine, encoded and applied against live weather data.
He’s pulled riders off days that would have hurt them. He’s waved off tours the forecast said were fine but his gut said weren’t. And he’s watched too many captains discover Gulf swell, sandbar tides, or an August squall the hard way. This tool is the reference sheet he wishes had existed when he started running these waters in 1987.
Every WXRR is grounded in live, publicly-verifiable data. Nothing is invented, guessed, or interpreted by an LLM. Here’s exactly what powers this app — and links to verify any of it yourself.
Wind speed, gusts, direction, weather codes, CAPE (atmospheric instability), and precipitation probability. Powers the hourly wind timeline, storm detection, and the launch-index scoring.
VERIFY AT OPEN-METEO.COMOfficial tide predictions from 200+ Florida stations. Powers every high/low tide time, height, and datum. Also drives the “swap tide station” dropdown so you can pick a proxy (e.g. Pumpkin Bay for 10k Islands inland).
VERIFY AT TIDESANDCURRENTS.NOAA.GOVReal-time river gauge heights for inland zones. Powers the Suwannee, Rainbow, St. Johns, Withlacoochee, Peace, and Caloosahatchee reports where NOAA tide data doesn’t apply.
VERIFY AT WATERSERVICES.USGS.GOVAnimated radar tiles overlaid on the Live Zone Map. Refreshed every ~10 minutes with 2-hour lookback and 30-min forecast so you can watch cells form and drift.
VERIFY AT RAINVIEWER.COMLive cloud-to-ground lightning-strike detection with <30-minute freshness. This is the data source we pay for — because free lightning feeds don’t update fast enough to keep a captain safe. If strikes are inside your safety radius, the report goes hard NO GO no matter what the sky over your ramp looks like.
LEARN MORE AT WARPULSE.COMEvery GO / CAUTION / NO GO verdict runs through explicit, deterministic thresholds Ron authored personally — wind bands, tide/wind interactions, seasonal storm patterns, and shallow-water risk by zone. This is not an LLM. Every rule is human-readable and auditable.
READ RON’S RULESGrok (xAI) is used only to interpret place names, explain a report in Capt. Ron’s voice, and read the NOAA surface chart. It never makes the GO / CAUTION / NO GO call or any score. If you can’t point to a source above, it isn’t in the report.
Ron’s reputation is well-known in the PWC community. If you’ve ridden a guided tour out of Marco Island, chances are you’ve heard of him. Full reviews and captain testimonials are available on his TripAdvisor listing.
READ REVIEWS ON TRIPADVISOR