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Terms of Use & Privacy

chesbaywaves.com

Terms of Use

What this site is

chesbaywaves.com shows wind, wave, current and tide forecasts for parts of the Chesapeake Bay and the North Carolina sounds. It is run by one person as a personal project and is offered free of charge.

Where the numbers come from, and what that means

• Wind, wave, current and water-level fields are taken from public models run by NOAA and others (HRRR, NBM, GFS-Wave, NWPS, CBOFS, DBOFS, RTOFS, STOFS-3D) and from Open-Meteo. Those organisations do not endorse, review or support this site.
• Some values shown here are not from any official model. Wave heights inside the Bay and the sounds, the sound currents, and the scoring and "downwind run" suggestions are calculated by this site using simplified formulas tuned against limited local observation. They are estimates and may be substantially wrong.
• Forecast data can be hours old, can have gaps, and can fail to update without any notice on the page.
• Nothing here is an official forecast, a marine warning, or a substitute for one.

Your decisions are yours

Sailing, windsurfing, wing foiling, kiting, paddling and boating are inherently dangerous and can cause serious injury or death. You are solely responsible for deciding whether conditions are safe for you, your equipment and your experience level, and for complying with the law and with local rules. By using this site you accept that you do so entirely at your own risk.

No warranty

This site and everything on it is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. No guarantee is made that the site will be available, correct, current, or uninterrupted.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the operator of this site is not liable for any injury, death, loss, or damage of any kind (direct, indirect, incidental, consequential or otherwise) arising out of or connected with your use of, or inability to use, this site or anything on it, including any reliance on the forecasts, scores or suggestions it shows.

Not affiliated

This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to NOAA, the National Weather Service, Open-Meteo, or any other data provider. Their names are used only to say where data came from.

Changes

These terms may change at any time. Continuing to use the site means accepting the version then posted.

Privacy

The short version

There are no accounts, no cookies, no advertising and no tracking of any kind on this site. Nothing you do here is profiled or sold. The site counts how many times its pages are opened each day, in a way that cannot be traced back to you (below). The only information collected about you is what you type into the contact form, if you choose to use it. The site does keep a copy of itself in your browser so it opens without a signal, but that stays on your device and is never sent anywhere.

What is collected

• Nothing that identifies you, if you just read the forecast. No cookies are set, no third-party script runs, and nothing about your visit is sent to anyone else.
• Visit counts, and only counts. When a page opens it tells this site which page it is, the name of the site that linked to it (just the name, such as google.com), and whether it was opened from the installed app on your home screen. The server adds these up per day. To count visitors as well as page views, it combines your IP address and browser type with a random value that exists only in the server's memory and is thrown away every night, and remembers the result until then so a second page you open that day is not counted as a new visitor. Your IP address and browser type are never written down, and once the night's random value is gone the result cannot be connected to anything, not even by the site operator. What is kept is each day's totals.
• Things saved on your device. So the site works offline and remembers how you left it, your browser stores: a copy of the site itself and the most recent forecast it fetched; any spots you save; your particle display settings; and whether you dismissed the prompt to install the app. None of it is an identifier, and none of it is ever sent to the server or to anyone else: it is read only by the page you are looking at, to draw that page. Clearing site data in your browser removes all of it.
• The contact form. If you send a message, the message text is collected along with your name and email address if you chose to give them (both optional), plus your IP address. This is delivered to a private Slack channel that only the site operator reads, and it stays there in that channel's history. Your email address is used only to reply to you.
• Rate limiting. To stop automated spam, IP addresses of people who submit the contact form are held in the server's memory for about one hour and then discarded. They are not written to disk.
• Server logs. For troubleshooting, the web server records each request's URL and timing, with the last part of your IP address removed and without your browser type, and keeps them for 30 days. They are not analysed or connected to anyone; the visit counts above do not come from them.

In the Bay Waves app

• The app is not counted. The map inside the app does not send the visit count described above.
• Apple Watch and widget requests are counted as totals. The server adds up, per day, how many forecasts and buoy readings the watch app, its complications and the app's iPhone widgets asked for. Nothing about which watch or phone asked is used or kept: no IP address, no device and no visitor count.
• Saved spots stay on your devices. Spots you save in the app are stored on your phone and, if you have the app on an Apple Watch, sent from your phone to your watch directly. They are never sent to this site as a list and are not tied to you. To show a saved spot's forecast, the app and the watch ask the server for the forecast at that position, the same request the map makes when you tap the water, and it appears in the server log like any other request.
• Your location stays on your watch. If you allow it, the Apple Watch app uses your approximate location to list the spots and buoys nearest you first. It does the sorting on the watch, from coordinates the server sends with every list, so your location is never sent to this site or anyone else. You can turn it off in the watch's location settings; the lists then keep their usual order.
• Bay Waves Plus is sold by Apple. The subscription is bought, billed, renewed and cancelled through your Apple ID, under Apple's terms. This site never receives your payment details, your Apple ID or a record of your purchase: the app checks the subscription with Apple's software on your device. Manage or cancel it in your Apple ID settings.

Map tiles are loaded from a third party

The map is drawn with tiles served by OpenFreeMap. When the map loads, your browser requests those tiles directly from that service, which means it can see your IP address and which areas of the map you looked at. That request is between your browser and them; this site does not receive or store it. Their terms apply to it.

Links out

Links to NOAA, Open-Meteo, NDBC and the WhatsApp group send you to services this site does not control and whose privacy practices are their own. Nothing is shared with them unless you click.

Your data

Nothing is sold or shared with anyone. If you have sent a message and want it deleted, ask and it will be removed from the Slack channel. Since there are no accounts and nothing is tracked, there is no other stored record of you to request or delete.

Children

This site is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

Questions

Use the contact form on the help page.

Last updated: 21 October 2026