The subscription service, like a professional weather-routing service, presently delivers the models to subscribers as GRIB files, which can be used by most tactical and routing software programs that have current overlay capability.

“Our big issue at the moment is that the GRIB files are great—you can do so much with them—but they’re not useable for the vast majority of sailors with smaller boats and less powerful routing software,” says Haire. To expand their market, TideTech is now developing multiple delivery methods to put the information in every sailor’s hands, in PDF format or a series of images, for example, pushed out to mobile devices.

Several big-boat programs used the service for last year’s Rolex Sydney to Hobart and Newport-Bermuda races, with good results, but TideTech is now focusing on delivering models for popular inshore racing venues, too. San Francisco Bay was their first major effort, in anticipation of the America’s Cup, and to refine this regional model, they’ve been collecting data on the Bay for more than a year. They’ve since agreed to supply a license to the America’s Cup Race Management team, which will use it leading up to and possibly for the 34th America’s Cup—providing more accurate tidal information to all teams, and possibly integrate that data into the television production (where they could overlay vectors to explain differences in current across the racecourse).

The subscription fee is presently $25 for two days of access to the server (a monthly fee is $80, and it goes upward from there). At the moment, the available resolution for San Francisco Bay is 100 meters, at 30-minute increments, but for the America’s Cup, they intend to reduce the time-step increments to 10-minutes, and push it to an accuracy of 20 meters. The benefit of this shorter time-step model, says Haire, is that it gives extra insight into the timing and structure of the pronounced eddies that impact the racing on the Bay.