Richard Pavek of Yellow Ferry Harbor sends along some phone applications he recommends for his floating home neighbors:
Wunderground
Ever wish you had a personal weather station? Wunderground has connections with over a thousand personal weather stations across the country and makes them available to their subscribers. When installing, allow Wunderground to use your location. When it opens, find the small glass magnifier with three bars on the left. Click it. It will offer you three choices: Waldo Point, C Dock, or Kappas East. Click the Star closest to you. Then click Close.
Now the top half of your app displays your current weather information. Click on More to display wind gusts, humidity, precipitation and other information. Click Close when finished.
Note: The forecasts are not for your neighborhood, the forecasts are for all Southern Marin.
Scroll down past the map to Daily Forecast, then Hourly Forecast, then Air Quality, then to the Sun & Moon graphic. Click on Moon to see the Phases. Below are the Activity Forecasts.Storm Radar
The Storm Radar map is outstanding when the winter storms come. When installing Storm Radar allow it to use your location. The app will open centered on San Francisco with Sausalito in the title, along with local wind, rain, temperature, warnings and advisories. Open Legend at the right to interpret the coloring of the clouds.Slide the Radar Map to other locations to view their current storm activity and advisories.
The Time Bar at the bottom indicates current time. Slide the NOW button to the right and it will indicate the likely weather over Sausalito at the time you selected.
Wunderground and Storm Radar send out identical warning notices — you only need one.
In addition to the interactive tide chart in the Floating Times, Richard recommends:
Tides Near Me
Tides Near Me is simple and easy to read and use. When installing the app, allow it to find your location. Then select Sausalito Corps of Engineers (COE) as it has the nearest tide gauge.
Click on Map then select the Corps of Engineers. The lower left-hand icon will change to Now and the screen will show the last and next high and low tides along with sunset and moonrise.
Click the bottom middle icon labelled Week and scroll for the tides for today and next week. Because COE is a mile away, add twenty minutes to the times indicated for their gauge.
For those who prefer to use a local dynamic tide table, willyweather.com is an excellent one:
Caution, tide charts do not and cannot forecast tides! Tide charts show the average of tide readings over the past century —not the actual or expected tides. Actual tides will be higher, often much higher if there have been heavy rains or high winds have blown substantial amounts of water from Alameda or San Jose into Richardson Bay.The three apps are free with ads or pay a small fee to remove the ads. I pay for Wunderground and Tides Near Me, but not Storm Radar as it has never run an ad.
For extensive data on local rainfall and flooding, check out Richard’s 2022 post Richardson Bay Microclimate.