"Firing" shows up in our name, so it's not a word we get to use loosely. Every alert we send has to earn it — which means the actual work isn't sending texts, it's deciding exactly where the line sits before a text is allowed to go out at all.
It starts with the same five inputs, every time
Wave height, swell period, swell direction, wind, and tide — every spot in our system gets scored on all five before anything fires. None of them alone is enough. A big height reading with the wrong direction can still be nothing. Great period with onshore wind blowing it apart can still be nothing.
Why the threshold isn't the same everywhere
A generic "is it good" number applied evenly across every coastline would be wrong almost everywhere. A spot that needs a rare, massive groundswell to work at all has an entirely different bar than a forgiving beach break that's rideable on nearly anything. Treating them the same would mean either spamming alerts for a spot that's barely working, or staying silent on a spot that's actually firing by its own standard.
We recalibrate when the number is wrong, not when it's inconvenient
Thresholds aren't set once and left alone. When real feedback says an alert didn't match what someone actually found in the water, that's the signal to go back and tighten the scoring — not to explain it away. That's meant the wind-versus-cap math getting more precise over time, the swell-direction scoring becoming more graduated instead of a flat pass/fail at the edges, and specific spots getting corrected based on firsthand, on-the-ground knowledge that a generic model couldn't have known on its own.
The direction this always moves is tighter, not looser. It would be easy to send more alerts by loosening the bar — more activity, more attention. It would also mean the word "firing" stops meaning anything within a few weeks. For more on why we protect that word specifically, see Why We Named It "Firing."
What this actually buys you
A tighter threshold means fewer alerts, not more — and it means the ones you do get are worth trusting without having to double-check them yourself. That trade only works if the threshold is actually defended, not just described.
We hold the line so the word still means something.
Real thresholds, checked continuously, tightened over time — not loosened for more activity.
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