Outdoor Almanacs
The Paddler's Almanac
Free wind demo
Notion template · canoe, kayak & SUP
A connected Notion workspace for paddlers. Keep your routes, put-ins and portages in one place, log every day on the water, and open a live wind forecast for any put-in — sorted into three plain bands, with the decision left where it belongs.
The decision to launch is always the paddler's. The wind page describes what the forecast says the air is doing. It knows nothing about your boat, your load, your skills, who is with you, the fetch of the water you mean to cross, or how far it is to a shore you could reach — so it will not tell you to go, and it will not tell you to stay. “Calm” describes the wind, not your plan.
Cold water is dangerous regardless of air temperature. Immersion takes your breath and your grip within a minute, long before it takes your warmth. Neither the template nor the page carries a water temperature, because the forecast does not provide one and a guessed figure would be read as a measurement.
Personal flotation devices, required equipment and where you may put in are set by your own jurisdiction, and differ from one water to the next. Nothing here states any of them, and nothing here encodes a rule about when to paddle. Read and follow what applies where you paddle.
The put-in page leads with the wind: calm under 12 km/h, take care from 12 to 25 km/h, and above 25 km/h stay off the open water. Both numbers are printed on the page rather than hidden inside a score, morning and evening for every day in the forecast, with the direction the wind blows from. Three bands rather than a yes or a no, because a yes would be a promise nobody can make.
Each window is banded on the strongest wind in it, never on a daily average that hides a hard afternoon. The page names the figure it used, every time. On Canadian water the forecast carries no gust figure, so the band comes from sustained wind and the page says so — gusts run higher than it, and a missing gust is never read as a calm one.
Every route with its put-in and takeout, its portages and their lengths, the parking, the permits you needed and the notes you only learn by having been there. One tap from a route opens the wind page for its put-in. The coordinates live in your own Notion and in that page's address, and nowhere else.
Log each day when you get home: distance, hours, the wind you actually got, who was with you and how the boat handled loaded. The template totals your kilometres by season and by boat, and after a couple of years you are reading your own water rather than anyone's average.
Sunrise, sunset and the length of the day for the put-in, with whether the days are lengthening or shortening, so a crossing that looked fine on the map is checked against the hours that are actually in it. Air temperature and rain sit beside them for the same reason.
Your routes, put-ins and logs stay on your device and in your own Notion. The wind page has no
accounts, no tracking and no analytics, and it never stores or logs a coordinate: they go to MET Norway
for the forecast and to Esri for the map tiles, and nowhere else. The page is noindex and
sends no referrer, so a put-in link cannot turn up in a search engine or leak through a click.
Free to try
Open the page the template shows for a put-in: the wind band for every morning and evening in the forecast, the air temperature and rain, sunrise, sunset and daylight, and a topo map.
The sample route is a synthetic location, for demonstration only, and not for navigation.
You'll need a free Notion account. The template works on the free Notion plan, on desktop, in a web browser and in the Notion phone app, so you can check the wind standing on the landing.
No, and it is built not to. It tells you what the forecast says the wind is doing, in three bands you can see the thresholds for. Whether a given crossing is a good idea depends on your boat, your load, your skills, the people with you, the fetch and shape of the water, how far a swim to shore would be and how cold that water is — none of which is in a weather forecast. The decision is always yours, and a page that pretended otherwise would be worse than no page.
Because they are round, defensible numbers that the page states openly rather than burying in a score, and they sit either side of the range where a long reach starts throwing whitecaps and pushing a loaded boat off its line. They are edges of a description, not a rule: 11 km/h is not permission and 26 km/h is not a prohibition. You can see the speed the band came from, and which figure it was taken from, and judge for yourself.
Neither, in practice — it uses the strongest sustained wind in each window, and names the figure it used. Gusts would be better, because a gust is what capsizes people, but MET Norway publishes a gust figure for its Nordic region only: on Canadian water there is none to read, so the page says so rather than implying it has one. A missing gust is never treated as a calm one, and real gusts run higher than the number you see.
No. The forecast does not carry one, and there is no honest way to work it out from the air: a lake lags the air by weeks, changes with depth and with the last storm, and a figure invented on this page would be read as a measurement. What the page says instead is the part that is always true — cold water is dangerous regardless of air temperature, and finding out how cold yours is, is your job.
Those are yours to check and follow. They are set by your own jurisdiction — country, province or state, park, conservation authority, even the individual access point — and they change. The template and the page deliberately state none of them: no equipment list presented as required, and no claim that any particular launch is open to you. Find out what applies where you paddle, and record it in your own copy.
No. The map is for planning. Carry a chart or topo map and a compass, tell someone your plan, and check local marine or lake forecasts and advisories on the day.
No. Everything in the template works on Notion's free plan.
Yes. Wind is shown in km/h, mph and knots side by side, temperatures in °C and °F, and rain in millimetres and inches.
From MET Norway's weather model for the put-in's coordinates, covering about the next 9 days. It is model output for a point on a map: wind over open water runs stronger than the same wind over land, it funnels between islands and down a long reach, and it has no idea which side of a headland you are on.
Yes. Routes, put-ins and logs live in your own Notion. The wind page keeps its coordinates in the page address only: nothing is stored, nothing is logged, there is no analytics on the page, and the coordinates go to exactly two places — MET Norway for the forecast, and Esri for the map tiles.
Send a message through Etsy and I'll help you sort it out.