Guest Bio
Jon Bilger is the Founding Director of PredictWind, a leading provider of advanced marine weather forecasting tools. With a background as a competitive yachtsman and a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Auckland, Jon has leveraged his expertise to revolutionize weather forecasting for sailors worldwide.
Show Summary
In this episode, Jon Bilger discusses his transition from competitive sailing to developing PredictWind. He shares insights into the challenges of creating accurate weather models, the importance of reliable forecasts for marine navigation, and how PredictWind’s technology has evolved to serve both amateur and professional sailors. Jon also reflects on his experiences with America’s Cup teams and how they influenced the development of PredictWind.
Key Takeaways
- ✓ Innovation in Weather Forecasting – How PredictWind utilizes advanced models to provide accurate marine forecasts.
- ✓ Application of Sailing Experience – Leveraging competitive sailing insights to develop user-centric forecasting tools.
- ✓ Technological Evolution – The progression of weather forecasting technology in the marine industry.
- ✓ Impact on Sailing Safety – Enhancing navigational safety through precise weather information.
- ✓ Future of Marine Forecasting – Emerging trends and technologies in weather prediction for sailors.
What You’ll Find on PredictWind’s Platform
- ✓ High-Resolution Forecasts – Detailed wind and marine forecasts tailored for sailors.
- ✓ Weather Routing Tools – Optimized route planning based on real-time weather data.
- ✓ Departure Planning – Tools to determine the best times to set sail.
- ✓ GPS Tracking – Real-time tracking features for enhanced safety.
- ✓ Comprehensive Support – Resources and customer support for effective use of PredictWind’s services.
👉 Visit PredictWind’s Official Website to explore their services and learn more about Jon Bilger’s contributions to marine weather forecasting.
Learn more about PredictWind Ltd and connect with Jon at:
https://www.predictwind.com/
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Podcast Transcript
This transcript is auto-generated on recording, and has not been edited by a human. It may contain lots of mistakes, crazy words, and stuff that makes no sense. The host and the guest are not responsible for the accuracy of the transcript.
Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Big World Made Small podcast for the adventure traveler. So happy to have each and every one of you back and super excited today to have Jon Bilger from PredictWind joining us today. So Jon, thank you so much for being here. Oh, pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, no, it’s my pleasure. And you’re in Auckland, New Zealand right now, is that right? And that’s where you live? Yeah, exactly. We’re actually in Kauau Island at the moment.
at, uh, now I’ve got a holiday place up north and it’s a pretty beautiful spot up here, actually. Say the name of it again, because I gotta tell you, I always struggle a little bit with some of the, uh, the Kiwi. So what’s it called? Cowale Island. It’s a little island off the coast, um, about one hour north of Auckland. So it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s a magic spot. It’s been a lot of time up here. It’s, it’s beautiful. Yeah. And were you, were you born and raised in New Zealand? I take it.
Yes, yes, born and raised in New Zealand, I’m a Kiwi. All right, cool. So you’ve done some pretty cool things in your life and I want to go backwards just a little bit, pick up on some of those things for our listeners as well. Mostly just kind of want to get a feel for how you got from where you were, whatever you were doing before you got into sailing, if there was such a day and kind of what you did to get where you’re at now. So tell us, how did it all start for you? Well, I guess…
And when I grew up in a, my father was a very good sailor. He was a triple Olympian. So, um, so I followed him around the world as a young kid. And that was sort of ignited my passion for sailing. I think, um, yeah, one day I heard him over talking to his, uh, his crew at the time, um, Murray Ross. And he said, uh, Murray Ross said, Oh, you know, you’re going to get Jon to sailing. And he said, wow, you know, he’s too young. And, um,
Jason Elkins (02:30.03)
He doesn’t have enough money for a boat. So, so then I turned up the next morning. I said, I’ve got $300 saved up. Can you build me a boat? And it was basically how I started in my sailing career. Um, and then one, what age was that? And it was about, uh, nine years old. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. So, um, yeah, this is great, great, great start, you know, obviously very passionate family about sailing and, um,
Yeah, we did not just sailing, windsurfing and then recently I’m all into kiting and stuff. So basically, yeah, that was kind of my first big break in terms of the sailing side of things was navigating for Chris Dixon in the 95 America’s Cup. And yeah, that was quite an experience. I mean, we had a very young crew. I think the budget for the whole campaign was six million dollars.
So it was a very small team and we did everything. I’m curious because I honestly don’t really know anything about sailing. I’m aspirational. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos and for a while thought that it would be great living on a sailboat, but really I know nothing about it. So when you mentioned, you know, America’s up, small team, $6 million. So what is $6 million?
What does that look like if somebody wanted to participate and they had six million bucks or whatever? Does that buy a boat, hire the crew? What’s that all about? Yeah, so that’s the whole campaign. That’s the running cost. That’s the boat, the crew, maintaining it. And all the logistics to go around. To give you some perspective, the teams these days, they’ll be spending well in excess of $100 million. Oh. And you know…
big teams over 100 people. So yeah, so the size and the scale of the teams is certainly a lot bigger these days. But yeah, it’s good to be a small team. You can learn a lot. I think I was doing the navigating, I was doing the performance analysis, helping out with the electronics. So sort of like three or four people rolled into one, I think. I think we had about two days. How long is it?
Jason Elkins (04:51.598)
How long does it take to prepare for that? So you discussed $6 million or up to a hundred million, which is mind blowing. And what about the time commitment? Like from the time somebody says, okay, we’re going to do this campaign until the actual race. What kind of time is involved in that? Yeah. Well, the cycle America’s cup is, you know, around three or four years. Um, and so, yeah. And then assembling the team is, is a big part of it. It’s, it’s kind of like, it’s, it’s like a.
It’s like a company really, because about sailing, it’s really a technology race. So the management, the technology, and then the sailing combined makes the whole thing. So, and as you know, very famous America’s Cup skipper Dennis Connor said, it’s, you know, it’s always the team with the fastest boat that wins, you know. So you’ve got to have the fast boat. So you’ve got to have the right technology, you know, enough money.
and the right designers. So yeah, unfortunately, we didn’t have the fastest boat, but we learned a lot. We were a young team. And that was certainly a good background for the next America’s Cup campaign, which was with the Ilungi, the Swiss team. And I was with them for 10 years. And you’re fortunate to run the weather program for that team. And yeah, we had a huge budget there.
and some amazing technology involved. And that was the genesis of setting up Pridikwinds, which has been going for 30 years now. So yeah, it’s… Hey, very cool. And for those of our listeners and myself, because I was trying to ask the questions, I think they’d want to answer, which is easy because I don’t know the stuff already. So what’s the payoff for winning the America’s Cup? What’s…
What’s the motivation if you win? What does, what’s the, is it bragging rights? Is it patriotism? What is it that causes the, you know, these teams to come together and want to do this? That’s a very good question. I mean, it’s, it’s, um, it’s not like you, you win the America’s cup. You wouldn’t a huge amount of money sort of thing. It’s not, they don’t have an event organization per se. Basically when you win the cup,
Jason Elkins (07:18.446)
you own the cup, you own the event. So you get to write the rules for the next event. So you win the America’s Cup. Say for example, when the Swiss team, which I work for, won the cup, the rules were you can’t actually have it on a lake, you have to have it on the sea, but you can take it anywhere. So they decided to take it to Spain. And then they get to…
They get what they call a challenger record, which they one team, which they sit down and write the rules for the next event. So you can change the boat. You can change all the rules. Everything’s up for grabs. And it’s got such a long history. It goes back over a hundred years, back to Queen Victoria time, when she very famously said, so who’s winning and then who’s coming second? And they said,
They said, man, there is no second, because basically if you come second, you lose the cup. So yeah, it’s got a very prestigious history. And I think a lot of intrigue, I guess, attracted a lot of rich people over the years, all the billionaires. And it’s been a bit of a bragging rights to see who can win the America’s Cup.
I remember when I visited Australia, it was like, I don’t know where it was in the cycle, but it was all that everybody was talking about. And it was, I could tell there was a lot of energy, energy around it for sure. Has there ever been a point in your life when you weren’t involved in sailing? No, no, it’s always been part of my life actually since I got into optimist. It’s always been a very strong, and it’s really cool now because.
I’ve got two daughters, 18 and 20, and they grew up in the sailing scene as well. In fact, it was kind of a family joke. Growing up, we said, you can do any sport you want. You can do sailing, sailing, sailing, or sailing. Which would you prefer? Yeah, which would be preferred. They said, Dad, for the first few years, we didn’t really like it, actually. We sort of just did it to keep you happy, but now they love it, and they’ve…
Jason Elkins (09:42.574)
You know, they’re both into the movement of the falling classes. The windfall of the IQ windfaller, which is a windsurf with a foil and my oldest daughter, Lucy, she’s into the, um, the kite fall racing. Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s, and, you know, I’m, I’m doing it myself too. I’ve done the cutting. I’ve done the windsurfing. So it’s great to see, um, you know, the whole family into it. Yeah. Yeah.
So tell me a little bit about your wife. I’m curious how you met her. Was she, I’m going to say on board. I guess that’s a sailing pun. But yeah, was she on board with this whole thing? Was she already into it? What was that like? Yeah, I met my wife Tracy from, she was from Australia where she worked in Sydney for four years at North Sails, designing out sales. And at the time it’s where I am.
Metrace and she had grown up sailing as well, not as competitively as I was, but certainly enjoyed it. So we certainly have that shared passion. You had a family cruising boat together, 31 foot cruising boat. We used to cruise for the family for seven years we had that. And then now she’s into the winging, which we all do as a family as well. So that’s with a surfboard and the foil and you hang on to the wing. Oh yeah.
Yeah, we’re all super passionate about about foiling and sailing and having fun on the water. All right. That’s super cool. You mentioned you had a cruiser for seven years. So presumably a cruiser is something that you could live on. Is that correct? Yeah, well, it’s a it was a ferry of trimaran. So it’s 31 foot long. It was actually made out of carbon fibers, so very light.
Um, and you know, I used to, you know, we used to joke with Tracer, this is the luxury family cruising boat, but actually it was more a racing boat. We used to go racing with my mates on a Wednesday night. Um, and it was a class of boat in New Zealand, what they call the 8 .5 meter class of fitted within that box rule could be a catamaran or triamaran. And we raced that most of the year, but then for two weeks of the year, we’d sort of convert this thing into a cruising boat. So we put all the cruising gear on board and load it up.
Jason Elkins (12:04.942)
and go cruising for a week. But it’s quite a small boat. As Trace says, the advantage of it was you could be down below and the toilet’s right there, cereal’s right there. Everything’s in arm’s reach. You can sit on the toilet and make yourself breakfast at the same time. Yeah, exactly. So I’m curious. I mentioned earlier that I went through a phase of my life where I was kind of glued to
watching the YouTube’s or the families or the couples, you know, most of them, it seems like they have no sailing experience, but they sold their mouse and they went and bought a sailboat and just took off and basically lived in the sailboat. Is that something you have done? Would you do like, what can you share from your perspective about that? Because at the time I thought it was great. I was trying to convince my ex -wife. I was like, hey, let’s do this. And, you know, it was me and her and our teenage son.
and she had a totally different perspective on it and mine was totally based on nothing other than some YouTube videos. So I’d love to hear from somebody like yourself. Is that something you have done, would consider, would discourage people from considering? What can you share with us? Well, I mean, my sort of cruising is obviously pretty limited. We just have two weeks of the year. And as I said, we’ve got a holiday place, I’d be at Cowell.
And you always look out as I grew up, I’d love to go out cruising the Gulf to see that there’s so many great cruising places in New Zealand. And this is kind of like the dream to get the boat and discover all these amazing bays and little islands around the Auckland region. And so we did it, but yeah, the practical reality of it is somewhat different. I mean, it can be quite stressful because you obviously need to…
find a good anchorage. We had one time where the anchor dragged in the middle of the night. And just sort of the day -to -day logistics is a lot harder than being on land. And we actually made a video. I remember we made some family videos at this time. And it’s just like YouTube. You capture all the good shots, the amazing views, and it all looks fantastic.
Jason Elkins (14:29.902)
made this, you know, back in those days, the DVD and we sent it around the family. It was like the smoke and mirrors social media thing, isn’t it? It kind of looked idyllic. We probably had some of the biggest arguments I would say about tribute discussions. So yeah, it’s certainly, I think if you’re doing it, you know, full time, you probably get dialed down and you kind of know the system and get things done. But certainly when you jump off,
from your house, you know, a large, you know, reasonable size house into a tiny wee boat. It’s certainly a real test of relationships and handling stress. And so, yeah, there’s some, definitely some highlights, but definitely it’s not as plain sailing as you would say that, you know, it certainly has its moments. That all makes sense. Everything you just said makes absolute sense. And when I was kind of aspiring for that,
I think I kind of knew I was ignoring everything that could possibly be a downside to it. And I just wanted to believe the fantasy. Tanya, my ex, she’s just a lot more practical than I am. I think I envisioned three of us go out on a boat and maybe one of us comes back. And it would have been her. So she would have probably quickly, my son and I would have been overboard, I’m sure.
But at the same time, I think it is an amazing thing to do. I mean, I wouldn’t do it again in a heartbeat. I mean, we definitely want to get a boat at some stage, a cruising boat and cruise around the Pacific. That’s definitely on the bucket list. And you know, you come into a bay, there’s dolphins in the bay, kids are swimming with dolphins. You see some amazing wildlife, stingrays and cuttlefish and all sorts of things. It’s…
That’s definitely an amazing experience, a great thing to do, but you just got to realize it comes with its level of stress as well. So, you know, it’s not all easy. I bet it does. I’m also curious about, I’m just going to ask you all the salient questions that I’ve saved up over the years. And I appreciate that. And I think I hope that somebody else out there listening maybe has these same questions.
Jason Elkins (16:53.07)
One thing I saw was with kind of the trans -oceanic crossings, specifically I’m thinking of Atlantic Ocean, where somebody has a small boat, maybe a couple has a small boat, but they need a third for the crossing. And I’ve heard that there’s websites out there where you can go sign up to be a third, whether you have experience or not.
I don’t know why that’s coming up for me, but I guess where I’m going with this question is…
because your family is in sailing, your wife was in sailing, obviously your daughters have been around it. Do you have opportunities to share sailing with fleet rookies that have never spent a time on a boat? Have you had a period of your life where you were teaching people or introducing them to it, or have you just always been surrounded by people that kind of knew what they were doing? Yeah, you know, certainly in the small boat arena, we
I’ve definitely taught a lot of people how to sail, how to tell them how to kitesurf, taught them how to windsurf. So, I mean, and that’s a great thing, I mean, to teach someone who has no experience to do that and to see them get the passion that you have for the sport is something quite special. So, I think that’s a great way to make friends or help friends to discover your passion.
So yeah, there’s definitely, I mean, we had, we were racing the little trimaran. We, you know, we’d had a few, few guys are quite regular, but also people come on board that were, had, didn’t have a, you know, much experience, good, good friends. And, you know, you’re great in other sports, but hadn’t done much experience today. One particular friend, you know, you get quite passionate at some of these races, even though they’re sort of just, you know, club racing and whatnot. And,
Jason Elkins (18:56.398)
and you’re trying to beat your failure. I had teammates out there on another boat and I remember saying, yelling out one time, pull the blue rope. And he goes, I am pulling the blue rope. There’s lots of blue ropes down here. Because for someone who’s not coming from up in the sailings, you sort of instinctively think they would know what you’re trying to do at that particular point in time. But…
So it’s quite a complicated sport. There’s a lot going on. And you kind of forget when you have someone new on board, but it’s actually, there’s more to it than you think. Depending on that story you just shared is, I don’t know if it’s stereotypical, but it’s kind of the idea I have in mind of like, your friend invites you to go sailing and you’re like, holy cow, like maybe a little bit of intimidation kind of comes up because.
I can imagine the captain of the boats, there’s things going on or the skipper and they’re like, okay, do this, do that in the terminology and all of that stuff I would imagine can be maybe a little intimidating for some. And that’s true. So if someone’s listening to this. What I described there is in a racing situation, so sort of a high pressure situation when you’re trying to win and quite competitive. So that’s…
But then obviously the cruising situation is more relaxed. So that’s not a problem. If somebody’s listening to this and doesn’t have friends that are into sailing or just really has had no exposure to it and thinks that they might want to do something crazy like, you know, buy a sailboat, sell a house, whatever. But there’s obviously a place to start with most adventure activities. It’s easy to say, well, before you go like for fly fishing, I worked in the fly fishing industry for a long time.
before going out and spending thousands of dollars on these rots and equipment and griff boats and all that stuff, I’d say, there you go. Go with a guide for a day, just to see if you even like it. So how does somebody, and I realize that different areas of the world are different and what they have access to, but what would be your advice to somebody or maybe a couple that kind of want to see what it’s all about? What’s the best way to do that? Yeah, I think, I mean, definitely going to your local yacht club.
Jason Elkins (21:17.102)
and trying to get involved in that in some way, shape or form. So usually they’re, you know, using wanting to get a crew for, you know, for a club rice, might be a social race. And you can just, you know, come along and jump on the boat and go for a sail with it. And just, you know, that’s pretty typical around the world that you can just go to the yacht club and, and put your hand up. I never would have thought that. I, I’m happy I asked the question because frankly, I never would have thought that to show up at the yacht club or.
Maybe have social media you can connect with. I don’t know. I mean, it’s certainly very common in New Zealand here. You go to Yaukālaka and they’re always looking for crew on the boat. So you might just, you know, it might be just sitting on the rail, not doing a lot, but you know, you can get a feel for what it’s all about and see if you enjoy the experience. And I think, you know, like doing this a few, you know, doing sort of short coastal races is a good thing because people are getting people looking for crew and you get a little bit of a…
experience of going well, sure. I think that’s a great way to get a bit of a taster for it to see that’s for you. That’s really cool. I’ve done a few things and one was balloon pilot. I grew up around balloons the way you grew up around sailing. I was traveling with my father. That’s why I was in Australia. I was quite young. And it sounds very, very similar in the sense that
we were always, you know, as balloon pilots are always looking for crew because it’s not something you do by yourself. You’ve got to have somebody follow you in the vehicle. It’s always nice to have a couple extra hands. And there were times when we might have, we didn’t need 20 crew, but we were always just happy to have it. Well, there wasn’t like, there was a limited space on the boat. Like there might be with a sailboat. Obviously there was limited space in the balloon, but there was.
Yeah, sometimes there’d be three, four vehicles chasing the balloon. And it was all, it was always such a social thing. And so the way you just described it, it sounds identical to ballooning. So anybody that’s listening, this might want to get into ballooning. It’s kind of the same thing. Find a balloon company, balloon festival, just show up and say, Hey, I want to, I want to learn a little bit about this. And so, yeah, I see the connection there. And I, and I always thought of,
Jason Elkins (23:38.574)
ballooning actually is 3D sailing. I don’t know anything about sailing, but it felt like ballooning was made of 3D sailing because it was so dependent on the winds and all that stuff. What’s your… Do you have a favorite memory around sailing? And I know that’s probably tough because you probably have an awful lot of them, but is there something that comes to mind that’s just either terrifying,
And it’s your favorite memory because you survived or just anything like that that comes up to mind to kind of give us a better insight into some of the stuff that happens. Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, it’s not my favorite memory, but I remember sort of, I guess, quite an adventure one time as I did this race from, it was from San Diego to Hawaii. It was a Transpac race.
And I was on a large boat, a 70 foot sled. And it was actually three Kiwis and the rest were all Japanese. And it’s kind of almost an ideal race because most of it’s all downwind. You just end up going around the high pressure system there into Hawaii. And you know, you’ve got the gennaker up, the spinnaker up the whole time. And…
And, but anyway, we were basically about, I don’t know, almost halfway. And we were going through these rain schools and the chain plate that holds the mast up pulled right out of the boat. So the whole mast went over the side of the boat. And so we, you know, we had, you know, for sure the guys, it was very experienced and we chopped.
to chop the stays and we had to put a jury rig up to keep going and the jury was very good. We think we’re doing like six or seven knots even just for the jury rig to Hawaii but yeah I mean at that stage I think some of the owner of the boat had kind of had enough by that stage. We wanted to get off the boat and we had to
Jason Elkins (25:59.022)
He was on the boat with you. Yeah, he was on the boat, yeah. And then one of the crew members the previous night got a bit injured. He had a cut on the cheek when we were pulling the spinnaker down. And he’s worried about being then infected. So he wanted to get a helicopter to come and pick him up. But we’re too far out from Hawaii. It’s way too far out of range. So then we had to… So was that a… I’m sorry. I was just… Was that like a…
fearful like we might not make it type of scenario or we’ll make it, but this is just a real pain in the butt or. I don’t know how to ask the question, but like, you know, what did you, what came up for you? Were you thinking you might not make it? No, we, the Q with the three is Kiwis on board. We’re, we’re finding we can definitely gonna make it. No problem at all. But it was the, the owner was pretty keen. I have a language barrier there. So I don’t know. It’s full, full, um, you know,
Did he sell the boat shortly thereafter that you got out of it? Yeah, pretty sure he did. Yeah, pretty sure he did. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so we had, the only option was to get a tug to come out to get it, to get, you know, himself and a lot of the crew. But the tug was only like 12 knots. And we were doing like six, seven knots a year, you know, and Tom, him come out and turn around and say, he’s only going to save a few days.
And I always just think we remember having to organize this back in those days. We didn’t have a satellite phone. It was all on ECSP radio. And so the whole fleet could hear what’s going on. And I said, OK, we can organize the tug. But we needed some sort of down payment. So basically we’re relaying the credit card details over the ECSP radio. Hearing those things.
And then the funny thing was immediately canceled that card when you get back. Yeah, well, exactly. The funny thing is when the tug actually came out and most of the crew, Japanese crew got off, but the owner decided to save face and he wanted to stay on board the boat. So he stayed on board the boat in the end. Anyway, we made it. We made it into Hawaii. Obviously it was disappointing because we lost the rig, but it was quite a, it was a good sort of a feat to have made it there with the broken marks in the jury rig.
Jason Elkins (28:19.502)
So I’m curious, I asked you that question, you gave me an example of kind of a situation that obviously was very, or at least the boat owner definitely felt that way. And I’m intrigued by you because you also, you know, you do predict wind and for anybody that hasn’t read the bio or listened to the introduction for this call, you know, predict wind. Just real quick, tell us how did that come about?
Was that a scary moment? Was that something happened that prompted you to think, hey, we need better this or that? Or what’s the story behind PredictWin? Yeah, around the weather program for the Swiss America’s Cup team, Malingi, for 10 years. And we had some access to some amazing technology. I mean, it was just incredible. Big budget. And…
We had a lot of observations with the boys and with the stations on land so we could verify this technology, this weather modeling technology against this data. And then there was a lot of people in the team who would do other regattas around the world and they want to get this weather model set up for that particular location, for that regatta. So we would be setting the weather modeling up for different places around the world. In fact, even for my father, he had a regatta.
New Zealand and he wanted to know, he sang a laser, he wanted to know big rig, small rig and we made the right call and he won the regatta. So yeah, it was, we just had this, you know, I guess I had that sort of entrepreneurial streak in me and thought, well, you know, naively thought being an engineer, accurate forecast, how hard can it be to set up a business, you know? So that was kind of the genesis of the idea to set up Pridik Wind.
And yeah, it was a huge, huge, huge risk, huge investment like any company, you know, I mean, 90 % of companies fail within the first three years. And so we literally threw pretty much our life savings at that. And yeah, three years in, it was like, oh, don’t worry, honey, we won’t lose the house. But it was pretty shaky. But I’m very fortunate we kept on going. And that’s…
Jason Elkins (30:42.446)
Yeah, it’s going incredibly well. We’ve got almost 50 people involved in the company and a great development team, just some very, very smart software engineers and an amazing support team. We have about 12 people there, supportive customers. And for me, one of the big things is I just love them because we’ve got a lot of friends who’ve been racing, they’re cruising.
and they’re out in the water and safety is such a big thing. You’re going out there with your family. The best form of seamanship is not to get caught out in bad weather. So now with these forecasts and the mental modeling technology, it’s definitely, there’s no excuse to get caught out, certainly for the first five days. And with Predict Wound and the tools we have, it sort of makes it certainly a lot safer than it was.
four years ago, that’s for sure. That’s it. So I know it’s hard to guess like how many times it took them up with examples of where this technology, your company was able to avert in a disaster. Maybe you do, I don’t know. But I suspect there’s other times when you’ve looked at disasters or things that have happened, maybe even recently and…
I’m sure had that moment of, wow, if they had been using this, that would have turned out differently. Is that the case? Do you see things happening still? Or is everybody getting on the same page? Totally. We’ve got numerous testimonials of saying, well, thank you so much. Your models predicted this event. The local National Weather Center didn’t predict it. The boat sunk, and we were fine.
You know, it was, you know, so, you know, it’s definitely like, I mean, you know, just recently it was very unfortunate, but, you know, we had a coastal race here in New Zealand that goes from Auckland to Russell. It’s 120 nautical miles. It’s the biggest coastal race in New Zealand. And, you know, the briefing the night before, Nicole was doing the briefing from Pritiklund. He’s a marketing manager. And he’s saying, look, you know,
Jason Elkins (33:05.806)
We have a tool called weather routing. So it basically tells you, you know, you put in your start and your destination and you put in the performance of your boat and it’ll tell you not only the fastest way to get there but the wind conditions along the route and also the wave conditions as well. And then it takes it to the next level of actually all your boats dimensions because you put in the wood line lengths and the beam and the draft. It’ll actually model the boat.
and not only the primary wave state but also primary secondary tertiary and it’ll tell you how much roll you’re going to have. It’ll tell you how much vertical acceleration and how much boat slamming and for that particular race we can see there’s going to be over four degrees roll coming towards the end of the thing because of the swell state. So it’s quite dangerous on deck. There’s about 140 boats in the race and actually one other one person tragically lost their life on the boat.
we’re into a jive and the person that was hit on the head by the boom. So, but yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, it’s, we can only tell people what the conditions are and then obviously you’ve got to take the necessary preparations. But, you know, we get a lot of, you know, it’s probably the reason why we do what we do. We kind of keeping people safe at sea. I was going to ask, it must feel really good.
Yeah, they come back really good to know that you help someone avert some kind of, you know, that type of situation. And then I’m sure it’s all equally frustrating when someone goes out and uses the information and then more makes choices. It’s their choice. I get that I’m all about that. And as a balloon pilot, we, you know, I’ve seen that as well. Where, you know, each captain of the ship makes their decisions and.
But having the information is such a huge part of it. Is this a technology that you put on the boat? I haven’t looked at your website close enough to figure out like, is this a technology that goes on the boat? Is this just an app that’s on the phone? You just punch the stuff in and it tells you what’s going on or how advanced, how involved is this?
Jason Elkins (35:30.03)
Yeah, that’s it. It’s it’s goes from nap on your phone so you can have an app on it’s a good. Let’s go to Apple. App and there’s an Android app. There’s also you can have it on your laptop as well, so we have an app for the laptop for Mac and for PC. And then and then we have a connection to. You know to sell out connections to basically work with any sort of satellite device that we have an iridium.
Go, which is a portable device that’s very low power and has a backup battery. And that’s been very popular over the years. There’s a new one, new device coming out called the Go Exec, which is a lot faster and again, portable. And it has a built -in speaker into it as well for making voice calls. And then obviously recently, you know, with the Starlink,
that’s become very popular on boats as well. So that’ll just, it was like having regular entries on the boats. So you can, so basically you can get this information while you’re at sea, you know, at any time. The models update every 12 hours. So typically people are getting the latest forecast, you know, every 12 hours and then running that weather route with that information to get the latest updates. So the great thing is, you know, I mean, you can, you can literally get these updates all the time.
and make decisions to, you know, for example, if you’re cruising and you can see, you know, it looks like the conditions are getting worse. You can, you know, you can turn around. You can take it, make a different destination and avoid these sort of situations. That’s very cool. And your business partners in Nestle, are these guys that you were involved with in the note to stop or maybe a picture of like the people that came together to,
to do this? Are they all super avid sailors or are they a bunch of computer guys that have never been on a boat but they understand the computer modeling? What does the mix look like? Yeah, it’s quite a mix, that’s for sure. So originally when I started the company I was going to be in partnership with Jack Hetzee, he’s the head of the modeling division from CSRO where the model comes from, which is CSRO as a government institution.
Jason Elkins (37:49.614)
like Neewer in the States. Sorry, like, you know, Noah in the States. But he couldn’t actually work for the company because the government regulations said you can’t be in a private company and work for a… Using the same technology. Yeah, I can see that. So he was incredibly generous. I mean, he basically helped set up the modeling for free for me. And I always basically took on the company by myself.
in terms of, you know, shareholding and whatnot. And we started off with one programmer, one marketing person and just grew organically, which is kind of like the wrong way to do it. You know, with IT company, you should go and get investors and get them assemble a team. And anyway, so we sort of did it all the wrong way. But the great thing is now we’re kind of the master of our destiny. We don’t have shareholders to answer to or investors. We can do what we want to do. And so within the support team, we have
A lot of passionate sailors, we’ve got, I think, four of our team have done Volvo Ocean races around the world, so they’ve been around the world many times, very experienced sailors. You have people who’ve done Olympic campaigns, people who’ve done kite fall racing, Sam Bullock is head of our development team. So we’re all very, we’re in the support team, very passionate sailors.
And that’s, we have a lot of connections within the industry. We very listen to our customers. So we’re always, we have a weekly meeting where we’re getting these ideas and thinking about, well, what can we do? How can we make this better? And so the product has evolved a lot and we do a huge amount of things. Even just sort of not directly weather related, we have GPS tracking, for example. So when you’re going along your boat, it can send a position of where you are to our website and show where the boat is.
And so friends and family can see that. And if the boat stopped or gone the wrong way, they know that something’s wrong. They can do a blog post, upload photos. And yes, it’s evolved a lot. And the development team, we started off with one developer, as I said, and then we have about 12 developers. And I mean, we’re very fortunate that the people we’ve hired are actually a…
Jason Elkins (40:13.006)
absolute geniuses and they are very good in their field because without them if you have you know an average developer is you know there’s five times less than a real good developer and so yeah we have we have some very talented people there you know one of the developers for the weather routing is is an avid sailor he’s from Sweden so we have you know we have one developer in Sweden we have a few in the US and but most of the teams in New Zealand.
So yeah, that’s it’s, I mean, the company is only as good as a team. And so very fortunate to have, I think it’s some pretty cool. And we really get along well. I can tell you enjoy it. I can tell you you’re passionate about it. And I can, I can see why anytime anything that’s safety relating and helping you save lives is, is a good reason to get excited. And it’s ties in so well with the sailing, obviously. What are you, so what is,
What’s big on your horizon? Are you doing any big sailing adventures, races, or anything like that coming up here in the next year or so? Or what does your life look like? Yeah, no, we sort of, one of the big things is Trace is just learning to win. So she’s just almost got it, not quite. So, you know, each year we go to a place in the Pacific called Artitaki. It’s in the Cook Islands. It’s one of the biggest out holes in the South Pacific.
So that’s kind of like a – You say one of the biggest air holes? Atolls, yeah. Atolls. Atolls, okay. Jesus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All this talk about meteorology, I heard air holes. And I thought, oh, that’s a phenomenon I need to know about. I do know what an atoll is though. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the key reaction probably. Yeah, so we would go there for three weeks. So that’s kind of one of our big holiday things we enjoy doing.
It was just been a fair bit of time here at Kau Island. Sailing was doing floating up here as well. So that’s a big thing there. But now we’re really excited in PredictWin too. In the next few weeks, we were launching a whole bunch of new features which we’ve been working on for years. One of them is PredictCurrent, which is a huge thing. So I mean, there are certain areas around the world titled current models which predict current.
Jason Elkins (42:37.358)
We’ve been working on for the last three years, the title current model for the whole world. So basically most of the coastlines around the world. And so for particular areas, very high resolution, 100 meter resolution. But for the rest of the world, 400 meter resolution and 4K resolution. So it’s quite a game changer. And we will have an app called the PridicCurrent app, like PridicWind. Specifically, PridicCurrent.
Yeah, exactly. So I think the fishermen, the… I was just thinking that. I was like, there’s got to be a lot of crossover. The fishermen was the first thing that came into my mind. Maybe even commercial fishermen, but I’ve done enough offshore fishing to know, or near shore fishing to know that the tides and all that stuff can be pretty important. So that makes a lot of sense. So I’m curious, Jon, what’s that?
Yeah, we covered quite a few things. I learned a lot of new stuff about sailing. Next time I’m around a yacht club, I’m just going to go or I’m just going to find some way to get on a boat and crew because I just think that’d be really, really cool. And it feels less intimidating now. I’m just going to save my friend Jon over at PredictWinds so that I could just show up and crew on the boat. And I’m sure they’ll let me right on. So thank you for sharing that. I’m curious.
Are there any questions I should have asked or forgot to ask or anything else that you want our listeners to know kind of about you, Jon, about PredictWind, about sailing, about just, you know, the meaning of the universe type of stuff you’ve pondered, anything else at all that we should touch on before we wrap up? Yeah, I think I’d probably talk a bit more about the safety side, I think, with PredictWind, possibly. Yeah. Yeah, I think…
I mean, we really are passionate about, you know, keeping people safe offshore, you know, as I said, you know, a lot of our friends doing it. And one of the things we do have now is the ability to see all the boats in the world through AIS, which is AIS is a collision -debordment system that’s been around for many years. And it’s, you know, basically it’s a VHF radio and these signals are broadcast from commercial vessels and it can appear on your chart plot on your boat.
Jason Elkins (45:00.014)
But they also can go up to the satellites and we get that data for basically every commercial vessel in the world. So you can see whether there’s a fishing fleet in front of you or a container fleet in front of you. So I think that’s a really, I think just the technology has come so far in a short space of time where it just, I think makes sailing so much safer and easier. Whereas before…
you really had to be an expert. I mean, you think 20 years ago, GPS was sort of in its infancy. And so people using navigating with a six, I mean, I just find that mind bogglingly. I used to print out like I had a printer and there was MapQuest on the computer. So you could go to MapQuest and get the turn by turn directions, but then you had to print them out on the… With your printouts, like trying to figure out all the turns and…
And of course, before that, it was, you know, I mean, things things have changed. You mentioned, I’m curious, because you mentioned that all the commercial vessels, you can see where all the commercial vessels are. Are you limited only to the commercial vessels or is that? The leisure vessels do have AIS as well, but quite often the signal isn’t strong enough to reach the satellite. So they don’t always, depending on the equipment you have, they don’t always show up, you know, as an AIS.
signal to the satellite. Here’s a novice question. Help me understand the value of seeing where all the commercial… Because I heard you say maybe there’s a fishing fleet out there, I’m sure in some of the shipping lanes. Is that a common concern for the casual private sailors? I have no idea. When you’re crossing an ocean, you’re basically always going to have someone to watch.
to make sure you don’t collide with another vessel. Which is why you need the third person, but earlier. Exactly, exactly. So we have a watch system. And first and one of the primary things there is to make sure that you’re not going to collide with another vessel and also check obviously the weather conditions that you have the boat safe. So within your chart pod or with AIS, you can see basically has a 20 nautical mile range, 20 to 30 nautical miles depending on the height of your mast and weather.
Jason Elkins (47:25.486)
the VHF aerials located. But with this system here, with getting all the AAS data via satellite, you know, through Prydik Wind, you can see, you know, for the next, say 300, you know, we did through 100 -autical mile area around the boat, you can see where it’s going to be a busy night. So you can see, well, how many vessels are going to come across. And yeah, you might have done your weather route, it might be showing you the fastest way to get there, but it’s going through this massive fishing fleet. Well,
Probably not a good idea to sail through the fishing fleet. You don’t know what’s going on there. So yeah, that’s another safety thing. Because, you know, circling back to, you know, basically the safety side of things, we think 50 % of our customers are probably quite, got some level of experience, or could be quite very experienced. The other 50 % like yourself, you’re entertaining, you thought, well, let’s just give it a go. You know, we’ve seen it on YouTube. How hard can it be? And let’s get out there and get.
And they literally have no experience at all, like none. And so they really are these tools. They’ve just made it so much easier for them to actually, you know, they don’t have to be a weather expert anymore. They just have to, you know, spend a bit of time learning how to use Pritiklund and away they go. They’ve actually probably got far more information and far safer than 20 years ago, that’s for sure. Wow. The learning curve has changed a little bit. So.
That’s quite cool. Thank you for sharing that. Anything else on that topic or anything else you want to cover? No, I think it’s pretty good. I think, yeah. Yeah. No, I can tell the safety part’s important to you. And I think anybody who has been in a situation where they’re responsible for a vessel loaded with people that don’t know how to drive the vessel.
you know, whether that’s a real plane. I think I feel like airplane pilots, boat captains, balloon pilots, are just kind of a, we have something in common. We kind of that, that sense of responsibility. And yeah, because you really are. It’s a big responsibility to have a big boat, a big plane, big anything that has the ability to hurt the people that are participating in it, especially those.
Jason Elkins (49:43.374)
freak through that show up to volunteer to go on the boat. You want to make sure they’re taken care of. So I get that completely. So, well, I just certainly appreciate you coming on here and sharing and answering some of my silly questions about sailing. I learned it off a lot and it’s a real pleasure to have this conversation with someone that’s so well respected and admired in the sailing world. I feel like, you know, that’s why I’m doing this podcast. I get to meet all kinds of fascinating people.
It’s completely selfish on my part. The reason I did this is just because it gave me an excuse to have a conversation with folks like yourself. Because if I said, hey, Jon, can I just call you and pick your brain? I don’t know that. But here we are. So thank you. Thank you for taking a moment to share with the audience. I appreciate it. No problem at all, Jason. It’s an absolute pleasure. No problem. All right. Thanks, Jon.
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