Last updated 24 September 2026
Tansible Paddle is a tool for people who paddle on the waters of Northwest America from Oregon to Alaska, including the lakes and the vast network of fjords with complex tidal currents. It shows what the tidal currents, tides, wind, waves, temperature, precipitation and cloud cover are doing where you are and where you look on the map. It draws on the map a route that you built or brought in, and records a paddle. This page says what it does with your data. When the internet is available, the app shows the most accurate forecast it can get for each condition, place and date, which means downloading it. Beyond a forecast's range, or with no connection, the tidal current is worked out on the phone from harmonic models the app carries. The tide is worked out on the phone from NOAA's tide constants. When the internet is available it is corrected by what the nearest NOAA tide gauge measured over the last day and by NOAA's storm-surge forecast. With no connection the phone shows the tide from the constants alone, and says so.
Tansible Paddle asks for location so it can show the conditions where you are standing, put your boat on the map, and follow a route while you paddle. While a recording is running it keeps using your location with the screen off, which is why there is a notification the whole time it does — that notification is the platform's way of making sure a recording is never invisible.
Your GPS position is never sent. To fetch the current, the app asks for the piece of a forecast that covers the part of the map on your screen — squares tens of kilometres across — from NOAA, from the HYCOM ocean-model server, and from our own forecast service. Those servers can therefore tell roughly which area you are looking at, and while you record, the map follows your boat. These requests carry no account, no identifier and no name. Wind and wave forecasts are fetched as fixed regional pieces, the same for everyone who looks at that region. To correct the tide, the app asks NOAA for the last day at the one tide gauge nearest to you, by the gauge's number. There are fewer than forty such gauges between Oregon and Alaska, usually tens of kilometres apart, so NOAA can tell which of them you are nearest to and nothing finer. On a river the app asks the U.S. Geological Survey the same way for the nearest river gauge's latest reading, by the gauge's site number; there are eight such gauges in the app, one river apart.
Tansible Paddle can pair with a copy of the desktop program, so that routes and finished paddles move between them when you tap Sync. Pairing is something you do on purpose, by typing a ten-character code the desktop shows you, and the app works completely without it.
Once paired:
On the phone: uninstalling Tansible Paddle removes what it
keeps in its own storage — recordings, downloaded map packs, its log and its
own copy of your routes. Routes it saved into a folder you chose, such as
Documents/TansiblePaddle, are yours, and stay until you delete
them.
"Forget desktop" in the Routes list unpairs this phone and removes its key.
On the service: everything is deleted automatically 30 days after it is uploaded, and deleting a route on the phone also deletes it from your account. To have everything deleted sooner, write to the address below with your account identifier, which both the desktop program and the phone's Routes list show. We will delete it, and our backups roll off within 35 days.
Tansible Paddle is a tool for people who paddle boats. It is not directed at children and collects nothing knowingly from them.
If what the app does with data changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. The version is in the Play listing.
Questions, or a deletion request: support@tansible.com