39 years guiding PWC · Marco Island · Florida
Data & sources
Capt. Ron Hagerman has been guiding personal watercraft since 1987 — nearly four decades on the water, including the 10,000 Islands and Marco Island. This app is his GO / Caution / NO GO. 46 Florida launches, local rules tuned for Ron’s home water, all of Florida coming.
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.
No AI makes the call. Every GO / CAUTION / NO GO comes from live data and Ron’s written rules. Where a number is estimated (seas from wind), the report says so. Here’s exactly what powers this app — and links to verify any of it yourself.
Wind speed, gusts, direction, weather codes, CAPE (atmospheric instability), precipitation probability, and marine wave heights. Powers the hourly wind timeline, storm detection, and the launch-index scoring. Commercial API plan.
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, Santa Fe, Withlacoochee, Peace, Caloosahatchee, Kissimmee and St. Johns reports where NOAA tide data doesn’t apply.
VERIFY AT WATERSERVICES.USGS.GOVRadar tiles on the map, and the live trend the report scores. The loop shows about the last 90 minutes so you can watch cells form and drift.
VERIFY AT RAINVIEWER.COMThe surface chart on the Surface page: fronts, highs, and lows. Fetched from NOAA and updated about every 3 hours. Reading that chart does not change the GO / CAUTION / NO GO call.
VERIFY AT WPC.NCEP.NOAA.GOVPrimary lightning. Live strikes with a 30-minute lookback around the point being scored.
LEARN MORE AT WARPULSE.COMSecond lightning source. Vaisala strikes cross-check WarPulse.
LEARN MORE AT XWEATHER.COMHow the two lightning feeds work together. A close strike calls for shelter when either feed supports it. Xweather alone, close by, is SEEK SHELTER even if WarPulse missed it. A WarPulse strike close by is SEEK SHELTER when Xweather agrees, when radar shows a real cell, or when the Xweather feed is down. If Xweather answers and sees nothing, and radar shows no cell, that flash is CAUTION. If either feed is down, the report says so.
Street-map tiles on the zone map, radar, ride, and watch charts, plus imagery on the account home-port picker. The tiles show the map area. They are not part of the score.
ESRI.COMWhen you type a 5-digit ZIP on the planner, this lookup turns it into a point so the nearest Florida zone can be chosen.
ZIPPOPOTAM.USEvery 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 RULESBuilt on Vercel (hosting), Supabase (accounts), and Expo (mobile app).
Grok (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