Corona lockdown became much longer than anyone expected, the offices did not reopen and the thought of spending winter in total isolation seemed very gloomy. Luckily during the last surf trip, I discovered a co-working place, conveniently situated between the main surf beaches of Lofoten Unstad and Flakstad – the Arctic coworking lodge. The company I worked for had a flexible policy allowing us to work from “anywhere in Norway”, I took it quite literary and I drove all the way up North. (to my boss at that time: “Danke Volker!”)

Tutaj make a map

At that period I was pretty obsessed with the wave forecasting idea and I was willing to discuss it with anyone that would listen. One of those random talkers was a marine devices technician from Oslo – Magnus. He drew me a picture with a water pressure sensor located at the bottom of the surf zone that by measuring the pressure of the water column above – would allow estimating the wave height. That was exactly what I search for. Any forecast can’t be judged without the right observation – in this case, actual wave height! The common surfer wisdom tells you about overhead and double overhead waves – the only point is – the accuracy of such “measurement” is expressed in [sh] units (surfer’s heads), sometimes in non-standardized surfer bodies and it was tricky to convince any surfer to show up in really bad waves weather 🙂 . I did what I was doing so far: googling the water pressure. I googled https://owhl.org/.

Finding an open source – do-it-yourself kind of project was super exciting to me. That was the last piece of the puzzle I needed. The only issue was – I did not even know where to start…