Built by a surfer.
For surfers.

It was a grey October morning in Cornwall. The alarm went at 5:15. I grabbed my phone and opened the surf forecast app I'd been paying £9.99 a month for. The report read: "SSW 3.8ft @ 11s, W wind 14kt backing SW, HW 09:32."

I stared at it for a full minute. I'd been surfing for six years at that point. I still had no idea if that meant the surf was good or not.

So I drove to the beach anyway. The surf was flat. I drove home. I spent the next three hours building the first version of what became SurfTidal on my kitchen table — a simple script that pulled wave data and turned it into one sentence: "The surf is good. Go at 7am."

That was the whole idea. That's still the whole idea.

SurfTidal pulls live wave, swell, wind and tide data from publicly available APIs — the same forecasting models the professionals use — and runs it through a scoring algorithm that produces a single number out of 10, a plain-English summary, and a specific best time to paddle out.

No subscriptions. No "pro" tier hiding the useful information. No jargon. No login. Just the conditions, in plain English, updated every 30 minutes, for free.

The site covers beaches across California, Cornwall, New South Wales and British Columbia — with more being added every month. Every beach guide is written by hand, verified against local knowledge, and updated seasonally.

We use Open-Meteo for marine and weather data, NOAA for US tide predictions, and the UK Environment Agency for British tides. All of these data sources are publicly funded and free to use — we just do the translation work.