HarborFlo LLC is a Rhode Island company building Portside — a real-time boating information platform for Narragansett Bay.
Every boating app answers a question about the water. None of them answer the one that decides the day: is there room at the dock?
Chart apps show you depth. Weather apps show you wind. Reservation platforms handle marinas that take overnight bookings. But the docks a boater actually uses for a few hours — the town landings, the fuel docks, the restaurant docks — take no reservations, publish nothing, and give you no way to know what is happening until you are already alongside. So people motor across the bay on a Saturday, find the wall full, and turn around.
Portside is built around closing that gap: live availability at public town docks, fuel docks and restaurant docks, alongside everything else the trip depends on.
Where a dock has an attendant, they report it. The console is built around what the person catching your line already knows — who is tied up, who is leaving — rather than adding a job to their day.
Where it doesn't, a sensor does. Low-cost units report the wall directly over LoRaWAN, a low-power long-range network built for exactly this. One gateway covers a harbour. No wiring, no wifi, no mains power, and years on a battery — so a dock can report itself for a fraction of what running a cable down the pier would cost.
Where there is neither, Portside predicts it — from harbor helper reports, anonymous aggregated location patterns, and a model trained on how each dock actually fills by day, hour, weather and season.
And no reading appears without its provenance. Every dock status carries where it came from and how recently, and that confidence decays as it ages: a sensor silent for forty minutes is either broken or looking at a dock that has not changed, and Portside cannot tell which from shore — so it stops claiming certainty it no longer has. A confirmed reading, a likely one and an estimate look different on screen, on purpose.
A boater deciding whether to cross a bay deserves to know whether they are reading a measurement or a forecast.
Boating information is scattered across half a dozen apps and none of them were designed for the moment you are actually in — engine running, one hand on the wheel, deciding whether to go. Portside puts the whole decision on one screen.
Wind, gusts, air and water temperature, visibility and tide, from the buoy nearest you — not a regional average.
Small craft advisories and marine warnings in the National Weather Service's own words. No paraphrasing a safety message.
NOAA charted depths, numbered buoys, wrecks and rocks — shaded against your boat's draft and the current tide, so danger is drawn for your keel.
Where to tie up, how far the walk is, and which restaurants have their own dockage — the ashore half of a day on the water.
A local directory built for arrivals by water: beaches, anchorages, fishing spots, landmarks, ice cream, provisions and shops — each with the dock it belongs to and the walk from it.
Race week, the festivals, fireworks, raft-ups — with where to put the boat for each one, which is the part every event listing leaves out.
Request a spot from the dock attendant while you are still underway, and get an answer before you commit to the crossing.
What the fuel dock is charging today — live at partner docks, so the decision is made before the crossing rather than at the pump.
An advisory posted for your water. A spot opening at the dock you asked about. Your time at the wall running short.
A chartplotter knows the water and treats the shore as a blank edge. It will bring you safely into the harbour and then tell you nothing about what is in it. The entire reason you came — lunch, a walk, a ballgame, ice — sits on the half of the screen it does not draw.
A road map knows the land, but it was drawn for cars. Search for restaurants near you and it returns places across a bridge, twenty minutes by road and unreachable by water, ranked alongside the one with its own dock two hundred yards away. Nothing in the data knows you arrived by boat, so nothing in the results reflects it.
Portside draws one map that does both jobs, and the shoreline is where it changes hands. Over the water it is a genuine navigational chart, built on official NOAA survey data — charted depths, numbered buoys, wrecks, rocks and obstructions, shaded against your draft and the tide.
Over the land it is a full local map — the streets and landmarks are all still there, so you always know where you are — with the places that matter to someone arriving by boat brought forward: the dock you would tie up at, the walk from it, what is open, what has its own dockage. Nothing is taken away. The things a boater is actually looking for simply stop being buried among the things they are not.
One map, two jobs, and the crossing between them is the product.
The availability a boater sees has to come from somewhere. Portside's dock console is where it comes from — and it is built to be worth using on its own, whether or not anyone is looking at the boater's side.
It runs in a browser on any tablet or phone, installs to the home screen like an app, and keeps working when the dock wifi drops. Every screen is designed around what someone can actually do one-handed while catching a line.
Every boat drawn to scale along the face, with the gaps between them sized in real feet — so "will a 34-footer fit" is answered by looking, not by measuring.
Green is space you can sell. Amber is freeing up shortly. Red is over time. Everything else is tied up and fine. Nothing else uses those colours.
Arrivals asking to come in, boaters requesting more time, reported departures and overstays — one list, ranked by what goes wrong first if it is ignored.
The boater scans a QR code, follows a link, or the attendant enters them by hand. A dock that only works one way does not work on a busy Saturday.
Card, Apple Pay and Google Pay through Square. Billed by the hour with a grace period and a minimum, so nobody is charged for tying up while they ask a question.
Taps are recorded with the time they actually happened, not the time the connection came back — so an hour offline does not become an hour of wrong charges.
Boaters cannot see your price until they are alongside. So they guess, or they go where they went last time. Publishing today's price in Portside puts a fuel dock in front of every boater on the bay deciding where to top off — and fuel is a decision made on price, by people who will happily run three extra miles to save forty cents a gallon.
Availability is the other half. A fuel dock with one boat waiting looks the same from a mile away as one with six. Showing which it is turns a boater who would have kept going into one who comes in.
And the transaction gets easier at the same time. Card, Apple Pay and Google Pay on the same console the attendant is already holding, with tips handled properly — because the person catching your lines in a crosswind has earned one, and nobody carries cash any more.
Every harbor knows how many boats it took. None of them know how many it turned away — the boat that circled the wall, found it full, and left for another town. That number is the case for a longer face, a second attendant, or a rate change, and until now it has been unmeasurable.
Because every request and every refusal passes through the system, it can be counted. A separate harbormaster view is planned around exactly that: demand, turnaways, utilisation by hour and season, and what it is costing the harbor — kept deliberately apart from the attendant's console, so the people generating the numbers are never managed by them.