obxbrief

An offshore trip brief for the Outer Banks, covering Oregon Inlet and Hatteras Inlet. It pulls public NOAA data — no accounts, no subscription — and refreshes itself every few hours, unattended.

• What this page tells you (and what it won't)
• The numbers on the dashboard
• Rail time: how rough will it feel?
• The marine forecast table
• Buoy readings
• Using the interactive map
• About "the Point" marker
• The fishing guide
• Getting waypoints onto your chartplotter
• What this can't do — read this before you tow

What this page tells you (and what it won't)

This site does not tell you whether to go. It gives you three separate readings, in order of how much authority stands behind them, and leaves the decision where it belongs.

1. The NWS advisory — the authoritative one

If the National Weather Service has issued a Small Craft Advisory, Gale Warning or similar for these waters, it's stated at the top of the port card. That's their hazard determination, not this site's. If it says "advisory status unavailable", the alerts service could not be reached — that is not an all-clear, and you should check weather.gov directly before going anywhere.

2. Rail time — how rough it'll feel

A four-band comfort estimate (Easy / Lively / Rough / Punishing). See the rail time section for how it's worked out. It describes the ride; it says nothing about whether you should be out in it. The colours run cool-to-warm by intensity, deliberately not green-to-red, because a green badge would just be the old "GO" wearing a different hat.

3. The limits note — only when there's something to flag

This only appears if you have set limits for that brief. If the forecast exceeds them you'll see "Exceeds set limits"; if it reaches them without going past, "At set limits". Either way the note prints your own numbers and the date you set them, so you can see what it is judging against.

How the comparison works: NOAA publishes ranges ("Seas 3 to 4 ft"), and the check uses both ends. If the low end is already past the limit, it's flagged as exceeding. If only the high end reaches it, it's flagged as at-limits — NOAA itself isn't sure which side it'll land on. Seas forecast to build past the limit count as exceeding, because you'd be out there when it arrives.

The numbers on the dashboard

Water temp

The warmest reading among this port's buoys right now.

Wind

The strongest current buoy wind reading, with direction.

Wave

Buoy-observed sea height and period right now — this is a live reading, not a forecast.

Swell

The dominant swell train forecast for the selected day (height, direction, period) — a different source than Wave above, and it updates when you change the Day picker.

Best break

Distance and bearing to the strongest candidate temperature break found in today's satellite pass, if one qualified. "zones only" means no sharp-enough break was found, so the map falls back to general zone reference points instead of a precise spot.

Current

Modeled current speed and direction near the top waypoint.

Rail time: how rough will it feel?

The limits note answers "is this over the line?" It can't answer "will this be miserable?" — and those are genuinely different questions. 4 ft at 12 seconds is a pleasant day. 4 ft at 4 seconds is the same height and will empty a cooler. With paying customers aboard, a legal, safe, technically-fine trip that puts three of them on the rail is still a bad trip.

So rail time estimates the ride, in four bands:

• Easy — you'll forget you're on a boat.
• Lively — noticeable motion, nobody's suffering.
• Rough — a tiring day; the sensitive ones will feel it.
• Punishing — expect people at the rail.

It's driven by wave period far more than height, because that's the physics: human motion sickness peaks at a very specific rhythm (about one wave every six seconds), and short-period seas sit right on it. Long swell of the same height is a slow lift you stop noticing. The calculation follows an international standard for motion sickness (ISO 2631-1), so the bands aren't a rule of thumb — they're a published method applied to NOAA's forecast.

Two consequences worth knowing. A bigger sea can rate easier than a smaller one if its period is long — that's correct for seasickness, even though it reads oddly. And trip length matters: the dose builds the longer you're out, so the bands assume a full 8-hour day -- a realistic offshore run out of these inlets rather than a short hop.

You'll see it in three places, and they're not the same reading:

• The big badge at the top of each port card — the forecast for whichever day is selected. It changes with the Day picker.
• The "Rail time now" stat tile — the live buoy reading, right this minute. It doesn't change with the day.
• The forecast table — per zone, per period.

If it shows "–", the buoy or forecast didn't report a wave period. Height alone isn't enough to judge this, so it declines to guess.

The marine forecast table

Rows are forecast periods (TODAY, TONIGHT, and on out through the week); columns are NOAA's marine zones covering this inlet, named in plain English rather than by their zone code. Each cell repeats the wind, the rail time, any limits flag, and — when NOAA's text forecast includes it — the swell train for that zone and period.

Click any period name (the row label, on the left) to jump the whole page to that day — it's the same thing as using the Day picker in the nav: the big status badge, the Swell tile, and the map below all switch to that day too.

Buoy readings

Live observations from NOAA data buoys near this inlet — wind, sea height and period, and water temperature, with the timestamp of the last report. Unlike the forecast table, these are measured, not predicted; a buoy going quiet for a while (station down) shows up as missing data rather than a stale guess.

Using the interactive map

Click a port's tab, then look under the dashboard stats for the map itself. Pan and zoom like any map app; the layer-control icon (top right of the map) opens a checklist of everything that can be shown or hidden:

• SST — sea-surface temperature, satellite imagery.
• Chlorophyll — a second read on water-mass edges (blue vs. green water), same idea as SST but from ocean color.
• Bathymetry (100-fathom line) — depth shading with the shelf edge picked out as a sharp color change; structure along that line tends to hold bait better than flat bottom nearby.
• AIS traffic — where commercial vessel traffic concentrates, for situational awareness, not a fishing signal.
• Currents — modeled current speed/direction arrows.
• Breaks — the actual candidate waypoints, ranked strongest first; click one for its temperature, gradient, and range/bearing from the inlet.
• Buoys — the same stations as the dashboard, plotted at their real mooring position with wave height/period always visible.
• Forecast zones — one reference point per NOAA zone, colored by that zone's verdict for the selected day.
• Range rings — 20/35/50nm rings plus a red ring at the current search radius (100nm).
• The Point — see below.

The base map defaults to OpenStreetMap; a NOAA nautical chart option is also there, but it only actually renders detail when zoomed out — fine for orientation, not for reading depths up close.

Below the interactive map, the Charts section at the bottom of each port's dashboard has a static, full-resolution version of the same SST/bathymetry/chlorophyll panels — click one to open it full-size in a new tab.

About "the Point" marker

The fishing guide

A short list of what is being caught out there this time of year, and what is known about each fish. No language model writes any of it any more — every line comes from a named source, and the panel says which:

• Which species, and their share of the catch — NOAA's Marine Recreational Information Program, a survey of what was actually landed off North Carolina.
• In season / peak — the operator's own recorded local knowledge of these waters. That is local knowledge, not a survey, and a business has every reason to describe a season generously. It ranks the list; it never adds to it.
• Where, Prey, Rules — the NOAA species directory. A species with no NOAA profile says so rather than guessing.
• Keep — the NC Division of Marine Fisheries recreational table, with the date it was read.

What is not here: trolling spread and speed. No agency publishes those, so nothing on this page can source them, and the panel says so rather than making them up.

Getting waypoints onto your chartplotter

The Chartplotter waypoints tile sits right above the marine forecast table on each port's dashboard -- it downloads waypoints.gpx, a standard format most chartplotters can import directly off a USB stick or SD card (check your unit's manual for its own import steps).

The tile always shows the date of the satellite pass the waypoints actually came from, next to the "Chartplotter waypoints" heading -- that date is not the same thing as today or as whichever day you have selected. Waypoints only exist once a satellite has actually passed over and found a break; there's no way to get "tomorrow's" or "Wednesday's" waypoints in advance, only the most recent pass's. The download link itself is only shown when the day currently selected in the Day picker (or by clicking a period in the forecast table) isn't over the limits for this port, and no NWS advisory is in effect -- switch days and the tile updates with it.

What this can't do — read this before you tow