Terms of Use & Privacy

chesbaywaves.com

This site is a hobby project, not a safety service. Everything here is computer-generated forecast output that can be wrong, stale, or missing entirely. Do not use it as your only basis for deciding whether to go on the water. Always check the official NWS marine forecast and any active warnings before you launch.

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 analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind on this site. Nothing you do here is profiled or sold. The only information collected 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 analytics script runs, and nothing about your visit is sent anywhere.
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. The web server records requested URLs in its container log for troubleshooting. These are not aggregated, analysed, or connected to anyone.

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 main page.

Last updated: 20 August 2026