Wingfoilscout

Wingfoilscout

Where it blows. When. Which wing.
And whether the drive is worth it.

From your starting point, Wingfoilscout finds the best wingfoil sessions of the coming days – using three weather models, 278 spots and your own quiver. Free for noncommercial use, source code on GitHub, on your own computer, no account.

How to start See an example report

For the Mac, with Python 3.9 or newer · English, German, French and Spanish · PolyForm Noncommercial licence

The search: starting point, start time and three presets – Spontaneous, Weekend, Overnight trip
1Pick a time frameSpontaneous, Weekend or Overnight trip – one tap, then “Find spots”.
The best three destinations with time window, wind speed, wing size and drive time
2The best destinationsWhen, how much wind, which wing from your quiver – and whether it’s worth the drive.
Hourly grid: every spot hour by hour, coloured by rating
3Hour by hourEvery spot in the hourly grid, plus wind angle, waves, tide and weather for each session.

Example view with made-up weather data · starting point Hamburg

See it in action

30-second introWhat Wingfoilscout does, in half a minute.
The app on your computerAbout a minute with the app in the browser.

Each video loads only when you press play.

What’s inside

Not a black box that spits out a number: Wingfoilscout combines weather models with what you need to know about a spot – which wind directions work there, how much open water lies in front of it, and whether tide or thermal wind plays a part.

278 spots

North Sea, Baltic, Atlantic, Channel, Mediterranean and lakes – maintained by hand, mostly with their source, editable in the Catalogue. Missing one? Suggest it for everyone.

3 models + ensemble

ICON, GFS and ECMWF via Open-Meteo, plus regional models. The ensemble tells you how reliable a session is.

36 directions

Shoreline geometry from OpenStreetMap, every 10 degrees: onshore, side-shore or offshore, fetch and wave height.

Tides & thermals

Tide state for the hour shown (from a model, not an official tide table) and thermal-wind knowledge for known spots.

Drive time

Routed, not guessed – and weighed against your hours on the water. Overnight spots nearby come with it.

Review

Forecasts checked against measurements from DWD, KNMI, Rijkswaterstaat, GeoSphere, DMI and Météo-France. The Logbook learns from your sessions.

How to start

Wingfoilscout runs on your Mac and opens in your browser – in English, German, French or Spanish, following your browser’s language until you pick one yourself. Your iPhone can join over the same Wi-Fi (use the start file with “iPhone” in its name); the Mac does the computing.

  1. Open Terminal

    It’s in Applications → Utilities, or type “Terminal” into Spotlight. Two lines to paste – that’s all it takes.

  2. Apple’s command line tools – once per Mac

    They bring Python and git. Paste this line and press Return:

    xcode-select --install

    In the window that appears, click “Install”, accept the licence and wait until it’s done – a few minutes. If Terminal says they’re already installed, go on.

  3. Fetch and start

    Paste this line – all of it at once:

    cd ~ && git clone https://github.com/DarkPirateGo/wingfoilscout.git && cd wingfoilscout && bash "Wingfoilscout starten.command"

    It creates the folder wingfoilscout in your home folder, installs its only extra package (PyYAML) and opens the app in your browser. From then on, double-click Wingfoilscout starten in that folder (German for “start Wingfoilscout”); Neuen Stand holen gets new versions.

  4. Set up and search

    Choose your starting point in the app – and, if you plan ahead, a start time; the language switcher (DE · EN · FR · ES) sits next to the logo and version number at the top right (on phones, in the page footer). Enter your wings once in config.yaml – a text file in the same folder, created on first start; each wing gets its size in m² and its wind range in knots. Then hit “Find spots”.

Rather without Terminal? On the releases page, under “Assets”, download Source code (zip), unzip it and double-click Wingfoilscout starten.command. The first time, macOS refuses because the file comes from the internet unsigned: click “Done”, open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to Security, click “Open Anyway” and then “Open” (up to macOS 14, right-click → Open is enough). If it offers the command line developer tools, install them and double-click again. Each double-click file needs this once, and new versions come as a new ZIP.

The Python package is still called wingscout, the project’s name until version 2.0. On Windows there is wingfoilscout.bat – untested there so far.

Transparent, not guesswork

Every threshold, every weighting and every exclusion is out in the open: which hours qualify at all, how the rating is built from wind, direction, water, weather and gustiness, when hours become a session, and why one destination ranks above another.

How Wingfoilscout calculates – illustrated · SCORING.md – the same walk-through as text · Example report – what a result looks like.

Good to know

  • It doesn’t replace looking at the water. Forecasts can be wrong, spots change, and local rules apply on site – protected areas, swimming zones, dogs, access.
  • Built and tested on a Mac only. Your iPhone joins over Wi-Fi; Windows is untested.
  • Drive times can be estimates. The Python that comes with the Mac is built against LibreSSL 2.8.3 from 2018 and can’t connect to the routing server; the drive time is then estimated from the straight-line distance and marked “(estimated)” in the report – weather and report are not affected. A current Python (brew install python or the installer from python.org) fixes it.
  • The data comes from free services – Open-Meteo, OpenStreetMap, OSRM, national weather services – under their terms of use. Wingfoilscout asks sparingly and caches what it gets.
  • No account, no ads, no tracking. What you enter is stored only on your computer.