Blog › 15 September 2026
Planning the day — from “there’s wind Saturday” to leaving the house on time
Tuesday 15 September 2026 — London Kitesurfers — by Alan Jay
A forecast tells you it will be windy on Saturday. That is the easy half. It does not tell you what time to put the kit in the car, and that is the half that actually loses sessions.
We have all done it. You arrive at two, the tide is wrong until five, and you sit in the car park watching someone else’s good day end. Or you arrive at five having missed the only three hours that worked. The wind was fine both times. The arithmetic wasn’t.
Beach Trips arrived in v1.6. Version 2 took them off the south-east coast entirely. This is how to drive them.
A day, and up to three spots
A trip is a date plus a shortlist. Open a spot, pick the day on the strip, start a trip from there, and you land in the form with that spot and that day already filled in. Add up to two more — three is the cap, about the number of beaches you would genuinely consider on the drive out of London. It is an ordered preference list, not a pile: #1 is where you intend to go, and you drag the rows to change your mind. That order matters later.
Candidates no longer have to be club spots. The picker has a second section, Your spots, listing every spot you have added yourself, private or shared, anywhere in the world. One honest trade: your own spots carry no LKSA forecast, so a trip to one skips the automatic spot-switching and the Live Activity. The planner, the reminder and the calendar event still work.
Club spots are sorted for the day you picked: push-grade days first, then the merely kiteable ranked on knots, then marginal, with spots that don’t work for that date sunk to the bottom and dimmed. You can still pick one; it asks first.
The picker also asks for your location, When-In-Use only, and a Best for trip / Nearest me switch appears with a distance on every row. Decline and it simply stays on best-for-trip. More than 120 km from London and it flips to Nearest itself: a rider in Tarifa does not want Camber at the top of the list.
The timing model, which is the whole point
Here is the idea the rest of the trip hangs off: you choose when you want to be on the water, and the plan works outwards in both directions. Not when to leave. Not when to arrive. When your board hits the water — the only time you actually care about, and the one every other time derives from.
🏠 Leave home — on-water minus the drive and the setup. The number the whole plan exists to produce.
🚗 At the beach — on-water minus setup: everything between the handbrake and the water — parking, carrying kit down, pumping up, lines, harness, leash.
🪁 On the water — the time you picked.
🏁 Off the water — plus your usual time on the water.
🎒 Packed up — plus the pack-down.
🏠 Home — plus the drive back, which reuses the drive-out figure.
The form shows the front three live, with the setup and drive durations in brackets. Nudge “Time to leave” fifteen minutes earlier and the drive line re-labels itself 2 h 15 min, because that is what you just told it.
Those numbers live in Settings under Trip defaults: two hours’ drive each way, one hour setup at the beach, two and a half hours on the water, one hour to pack up. London numbers for Camber, Hayling or Greatstone, and wrong for you personally within about one trip. Change them once and every trip re-derives; they are global, and they sync across iPhone, iPad and Mac over iCloud. They are averages, not live traffic — the drive figure is a number you own.
What the water will actually let you do
At a tide-restricted beach the choice of on-water time is not really free. Each spot has a green tide window — by default three hours either side of its working tide event, low water at the low-tide spots and high water at the high-tide ones, with overrides where local knowledge says otherwise. A day is only called kiteable when there are two hours of 15 kt-plus working-direction wind inside that window, so the riding window on a spot page is already the overlap of wind and tide.
Then daylight trims it. The window is clipped to sunrise and sunset, and when the clip bites you get a star note naming the time it goes dark — riders do ride into dusk, and that is your call, not ours. If daylight leaves under an hour standing the day drops to marginal and says it ran out of light. Where we have no sun data, nothing is trimmed and no claim is made.
The trip form knows all of it: wind window, tide window, verdict, knots and direction at your chosen hour, tide events with heights, a kite size for your weight. It starts you at the beginning of the day’s peak window — or the wind window, or the windiest hour — and for a trip planned today, never at an hour you could not reach.
When the forecast moves
Before you commit at all, version 2.1 gave every spot a How sure is this? section — the Met Office ensemble’s chance of 12, 15 or 18 kt+ over the next 54 hours. “15 kt+ at 80% tomorrow” is a trip you plan tonight; “41%” is one you sleep on. It only covers the next 54 hours, deliberately, so for a Saturday planned on Tuesday you are back to watching the models — which is where the app earns its keep.
Between Tuesday and Saturday the models will change their minds. The app re-checks your candidates against each new feed, but it walks your list in your order: the first candidate whose day is push-grade wins; failing that, the first that is at least kiteable; failing everything, it stays on #1 rather than pretending. So it never demotes your first choice over a knot — only when #1 has genuinely dropped a band below a backup you ranked yourself.
Override it whenever you like. Tap any candidate to make it primary, or drag it to the top; that re-declares “I’m going” at the new spot, refreshes the running Live Activity and rewrites the calendar event. Cancelling from a spot page gives you two buttons — Switch moves the next candidate up and leaves the trip, reminder and calendar intact; Cancel the whole trip tears the lot down.
Getting the plan out of the app
“I’m going” — declared for you the moment you save the trip, and re-pointed whenever the trip moves to a backup. Day pills carry the count; spot pages show who else is heading there by nickname. Leave the nickname blank and you are just a number.
Calendar — off by default, since it needs Calendar permission. Turn it on globally in Trip defaults, or tick Add to Calendar on a single trip without touching that setting. The event spans leave-home to home — five hours past your on-water time on the shipped numbers — with the target spot, the candidates and the chain of times in the notes, from templates you can edit. Cancel the trip and the event is renamed “Cancelled: …” before it is removed, so a shared calendar sees it go.
KitePool lifts — open rides for your date and candidate spots appear on the trip itself: driver, seats free out of total, departure time, pickup areas, session length, overnight flag. Drivers who have not committed to a beach yet show up too. Tap one to book on kitepool.uk, or use Find a lift and Offer your spare seats, pre-filled with the date, the spot and your computed departure time.
On the day
A pre-drive reminder — a local notification fifteen minutes before your leave-home time by default, adjustable from zero (off) to an hour. “Time to head out — leave home in 15 minutes”, with the trip named.
A Live Activity, on iPhone — it starts itself two hours before you leave and runs until four hours past your on-water time. Lock Screen and Dynamic Island carry the spot, the wind and direction at your target hour, the verdict, a kite size for your weight, the next tide (“Next tide H 13:35 ↑”) and a countdown to departure. Moved to a backup, it wears an orange shifted from #1 chip; more than a day out it swaps the wind headline for “3 days till you leave home”. The Mac has no Live Activities at all — it is an iPhone feature, and notifications are the equivalent everywhere else.
The morning push — your favourite spots, plus, if you leave Include standout spots outside my favourites on, up to two spots you have not starred, listed separately and only when they are a whole quality band better than anything you have. It also decides whether you hear anything at all on a day none of your spots work.
Travelling
Far from London the app adapts on its own — a first fix more than 150 km out centres the map on you and turns the community-spot layer on, and the London alerts hush beyond 500 km. Travel mode, in Settings under Travel, makes that deliberate rather than accidental. One switch: the map opens on you with community spots shown, and the London spot alerts go quiet, wherever you are — the useful part being the week before a trip, while you are still in Hackney. Two override toggles keep the far-away alerts coming if you want them. Session log, analytics and community spot pages carry on as normal: the record-and-display half of the idea.
A worked Saturday
Illustrative numbers, not a forecast — a tide-restricted low-tide beach, early September.
Low water is 08:20, so the green tide window runs roughly 05:20 to 11:20. Sunrise is 06:18, which clips the front off it: the riding window starts there, with a note that the early part would have been pre-dawn. The wind reaches working strength and direction around 07:00.
So you set on the water at 07:30 — inside the tide window, inside daylight, into the wind rather than ahead of it. On the shipped timings the plan reads: leave home 04:30, at the beach 06:30, on the water 07:30, off at 10:00, packed by 11:00, home about 13:00. The reminder fires at 04:15, and the Live Activity would appear at 02:30 — a decent argument for shortening its lead.
That sets the alarm, fills the calendar, and hands the driver a departure time for the lift. None of it is clever. It is arithmetic nobody does properly at eleven at night with a forecast open in one tab and a tide table in another.
The same model runs in the web app, with two differences: switching to the best backup is an opt-in checkbox rather than automatic, and trips live in that browser’s storage instead of syncing.
Same principles as always: no LKSA account, no LKSA login, no ads, no tracking. Your trips, timings and session log stay on your own devices.
Get the app on the App Store. If the timing model does something odd, tell us in the usual WhatsApp channels.
See you on the beach.