Quick start
Five steps and you're running:
- Download. WAVOA is on the App Store and Google Play. The app works without an account in “guest mode” — forecasts only, no favorites, no alerts.
- Sign in with Apple, Google, or email + password. Apple Sign-In gives you a relay email by default. The password field has a live strength meter on signup.
- Pick your sports. Profile → Sports — multi-select windsurf, kite, wing, surf in any combination. Drag to reorder priority; the globe color-codes against your top sport first.
- Star spots. Browse the curated catalogue, search by name or country, or long-press anywhere on the globe / map to drop a custom user-pinned spot. Star three to five favorites to get started.
- Set an alert. Open any favorite → Alerts → New rule. Pick wind speed, gust, wave height, period, direction band, and time window. Two tiers per favorite (yellow = approaching, red = firing). The push goes out the moment your default model crosses the line.
Forecasts & accuracy
WAVOA runs four models in parallel, never blended. What you see is one model end-to-end:
- ECMWF — 0.25° global, 6-hourly. Best long-range accuracy in most of the world; our default for 3–7 day planning.
- GFS — NOAA, 0.25° global, 6-hourly. Free, fresh, fast. Use it as a sanity check against ECMWF.
- ICON-D2 / ICON-EU — Deutscher Wetterdienst, 2 km (DACH) and 6.5 km (coastal Europe), hourly. Best for Alpine spots, lake thermals, and Mediterranean coasts.
- HRRR — NOAA, 3 km CONUS, hourly rapid-refresh. Best for US coastal and Great Lakes spots.
Spread / model agreement.When all four models agree, the NOW card shows “confidence high”. When two diverge by more than 4 kt or 0.5 m, confidence drops. Don't book a flight on a low-confidence forecast — it usually means a frontal boundary is near and one of the models will end up wrong.
Per-spot model picker. If you find ICON is consistently right at Pozo or HRRR nails Hood River, pin that as the default for the spot. The big NOW number, the firing-rail rating, and any alerts then use your pinned model rather than ours.
Spots & favorites
Adding a favorite. Tap the star icon on any spot card or detail screen. Drift accounts can star up to 3 favorites; Plane and Foil are unlimited.
Removing a favorite. Tap the star again, or swipe-delete in your favorites list.
Adding a custom spot. Long-press anywhere on the globe or the map. Name it (max 60 chars), pick which sports apply, save. Custom spots are private to your account — they never appear in shared listings or in the curated catalogue, even with Plane.
Sport-aware view.Switching the sport filter recolors and re-ranks every pin against that sport's thresholds. Switching to “all sports” takes the strongest tier per spot across whatever sports it's tagged for.
Color thresholds.Profile → Thresholds. Per-sport sliders for the yellow (approaching) and red (firing) cutoffs on wind speed and wave height. Defaults are tuned for the average rider; raise the wind threshold if you're a power junkie, lower it for a wave-purist take.
Alerts
Alerts are per-favorite, per-sport, two-tier. Each rule combines:
- Wind speed (knots) — min, max, or both.
- Gust (knots) — useful for filtering out spikey, unrideable days.
- Wave height (m) and period (s) — only the spots tagged for surf or wave-windsurf will use these.
- Direction band — pick a compass direction and a tolerance (±30°, ±45°). Onshore-only setups become trivial.
- Time window — “weekend mornings”, “sunrise to sunset”, “always”, or a custom range.
- AND/OR logic — chain conditions with explicit operators. “18–32 kt AND E ±30°” is a common windsurf-side-shore rule.
Why didn't my alert fire? In order, the most common reasons:
- The default model didn't cross the threshold. Check the meteogram for that spot — if your alert says ≥ 22 kt and the model peaked at 21, that's by design.
- Push permission is off. iOS: Settings → WAVOA → Notifications. Android: Settings → Apps → WAVOA → Notifications.
- Quiet hours are active. By default we don't deliver pushes between 22:00 and 07:00 local time on accounts known to be under 16. Adults: Profile → Alerts → Quiet hours to opt in.
- The OS removed the app from background. iOS sometimes does this for apps that haven't been opened in a few days; Android for low-memory devices. Open the app once and the alert stack rebuilds.
- The spot data refresh is stuck. Pull-down on the favorite's detail screen forces a refresh.
My Gear · gear matching
Adding gear. Profile → My Gear → Add. Pick the sport (windsurf / kite / wing / surf), the type (sail, board, kite, wing, fin), the brand (60+ curated, free-text fallback), and the model name + size.
Wind & wave windows. For every piece of gear, set the wind range and (where relevant) the wave range it shines in. Defaults come from brand specs where we have them — adjust them to your weight and skill.
Go-To setups.On any spot's detail screen, the Go-To Setups panel ranks your top three gear combinations by how well today's forecast matches each setup's windows. Match percentage is shown explicitly. If nothing is over 70%, the panel says “not your day” — better than recommending the wrong sail.
Gear age & sessions.When you log a session, WAVOA tags every gear item used. Profile → My Gear → (item) shows total sessions, total hours, and a weather histogram of conditions you've actually ridden it in.
Logbook
Three-tap log. From the home screen, tap Log → pick sport → pick spot → rate 1–5 stars. WAVOA fills the rest from the cached forecast at session time.
What gets auto-filled. Wind speed, gust, direction, wave height, period, water and air temp, tide phase, and sun + moon position. All editable — if you remember it differently, the field is yours.
Notes & photos. Free-text notes (Markdown supported), and a photo / video field that stays on-device unless you explicitly enable cloud-sync. Notes sync; photos do not by default.
Stats.Profile → Logbook → Stats shows monthly + yearly histograms, total hours by sport, average wind / wave per session, and a heatmap of your most-ridden spots. None of this is shared with anyone — it's for you.
Sync. The logbook is cloud-synced by default to our Supabase EU database, protected by row-level security. Sign in on a new device and your logbook reappears within a few seconds. Disable per-device under Profile → Sync if you prefer it stays local.
Account, sync, and data
Sign-in providers. Apple, Google, or email + password. The password field has a live strength checklist on signup; we hash with Argon2id.
Switch sign-in method. Profile → Account → Change sign-in. You can change your email, password, or even swap from email to Apple Sign-In without losing your favorites, alerts, gear or logbook.
Multi-device sync. Sign in on iOS, Android, or both — favorites, alerts, gear, and logbook follow you. Per-device settings (theme, units, default sport) stay local.
Export your data. Use the data-export form from your account email — the topic dropdown is pre-selected. We send a JSON bundle of every byte we hold on you within 7 days, usually within two.
Delete your account. Profile → Privacy → Delete my account. We honour it within 7 days, no questions. See Data & deletion for the byte-by-byte breakdown.
Subscription & billing
Plans. Three tiers, named after the windsurf-progression metaphor:
- Drift (€0 forever) — full map, all four forecast models, webcams, 7-day marine + tide, sessions, read community reports. Capped at 3 favourites and 1 alert.
- Plane (€4.99 / month or €49.99 / year — save 17%) — unlimited favourites, 10 alerts with time windows, custom user-pinned spots (private), multi-sport My Gear + Go-To recommender, 5-spot compare, per-sport color thresholds, and the right to submit community reports. Starts with a 7-day trial.
- Foil (€11.99 / month or €119.99 / year — save 17%) — everything in Plane plus smart-match alerts (auto-discover new spots by sport + radius), unlimited alerts, the ability to publish your own custom spots into the community catalogue, and Strava / Apple Health / Garmin Connect integrations.
Why community writes are paid.Reading reports is free; writing one is Plane+ because every contribution that another user can see needs a payment-verified identity behind it (Apple / Google IAP). That's how we satisfy content-moderation law and respond to law-enforcement requests if user-generated content is misused.
Billing channels. App Store (iOS), Google Play (Android), or Stripe (web). Payments are handled by the platform — WAVOA never sees your card details.
Cancellation. Cancel anytime in your store account or Profile → Subscription. The plan keeps working until the end of the period.
Refunds.14-day no-questions-asked refund window from first purchase, EU consumer-law style. After that, store policy applies — Apple and Google handle their own refunds via their support flows. We don't pro-rate annual plans beyond the 14-day window unless required by law.
Troubleshooting
The app won't open / hangs on launch.Force-close from the app switcher, reopen. If that doesn't fix it, reinstall — your account, favorites, alerts and synced logbook are restored on next sign-in.
Forecast hasn't refreshed.Pull down on the favorite's detail screen or on the home Feed. If still stuck, Profile → Sync → “Refresh now”. If your account ID is somehow detached from the data layer, you'll get an “account not synced” banner — sign out and back in to reattach.
Alert never fires. See Alerts above for the diagnostic order.
Login problems.
- Verify the email arrived (check spam).
- Apple Sign-In: appleid.apple.com → Sign-In and Security → Apps Using Apple ID — confirm WAVOA is listed.
- Google Sign-In: myaccount.google.com → Security → Third-party apps with account access.
- Email + password: use the “Forgot password” link on the sign-in screen. Reset emails arrive within five minutes; the link expires in 24 hours.
Lost custom spot. Drop us a line. We retain a 30-day backup of every account; if you lost a custom spot in the last month we can usually restore it.
Map / globe is blank. Network restrictions on corporate Wi-Fi sometimes block the Carto basemap CDN. Switch to mobile data, or contact your IT to allow basemaps.cartocdn.com.
Contact us
One form, one inbox, one human reading it. Pick the topic that matches and you'll usually hear back within one business day, always within five.
- General questions / feature requests: contact form
- Privacy & data requests: contact form, topic “Privacy & data”
- Press & partnerships: contact form, topic “Press & partnerships”
- Security disclosures: contact form, topic “Security disclosure” — see /license and our security.txt for the policy.
- Data Protection Officer: contact form, topic “Data Protection Officer”
For physical mail: WAVOA SAS · 12 rue Sainte-Catherine · 33000 Bordeaux · France. The legally-mandated mailbox is wavoa.app@outlook.com — see the imprint.