When you'd request one
An @Desk briefing is built for the trip you've already decided to run. You know you're going Saturday; you know roughly where; you want a plan locked in, written down, and ready to share. That's @Desk. It is not the tool you open to decide whether to go — that's trip planning, which is a different conversation with Sedna. @Desk starts once the decision is made.
Most captains request one the night before. Some do it forty-eight hours out — especially charter captains who want the briefing in their clients' inboxes before the clients leave work for the weekend. Either works — but if you run it early, you owe yourself a second pass the night before you leave.
Offshore fishing is weather-gated, and marine forecasts decay fast.
- 12 hours out — wind and sea state are reasonably close to what you'll actually see.
- 24 hours out — call it 50:50.
- 48 hours out — nearly a wild guess.
A briefing pulled Wednesday for a Saturday trip is built against two-day-old model output. The tactical call, the run plan, the sea-state suitability — all of it was good reasoning against stale inputs. If you ran @Desk early (charter client wanted it in their inbox Thursday morning), re-run it Friday evening against the refreshed forecast and forward the updated version. The whole point of the tool is reasoning against this week's water — don't throw that away by acting on an old pull.
The four-step flow
From your Dashboard or the portal home page, click Request @Desk Briefing. The portal opens the questionnaire. Nothing fancy — a web form, a handful of fields, the kind of thing you fill in while the coffee finishes brewing.
Six fields, roughly: trip date, departure port (defaults to your home port), target area or species, preferred methods, departure time window, and the crew size / notes field for anything specific (first-time guest, rod-count limit, a client who gets seasick after three hours, etc.).
The more you put in the notes field, the more the briefing shapes around it. "Father-in-law's first keeper bass" produces different copy than "serious charter, three clients, they asked for yellowfin." Sedna is reasoning against the human context, not just the fish.
Sedna composes the briefing and renders it in the portal within a minute or two. You see the whole thing before anything leaves your account:
- Conditions summary — SST, thermal breaks, current vectors, sea state forecast, solunar rating.
- Tactical recommendation — where to set up, what spread, which depth, why.
- Run plan — distance from your departure port, estimated time at cruise, fuel budget against your boat's capacity, reserve on the round trip.
- Gear notes — line class, leader, weights, hooks, live-bait availability at your usual shop if she knows it.
- Fleet intel recap — what the network saw in or near that area over the last few days, stripped of captain names and boat identifiers.
Read through it. The briefing is built as a stack of module cards — Conditions, Tactical, Run Plan, Gear, Fleet Intel. Each card has a toggle. If a module doesn't belong in the copy you're about to forward — maybe the Fleet Intel recap is thin this week, or the Gear section is obvious to a captain who's been running this spread for a decade — flip it off and it drops out of the approved version. Flip it back on and it reappears. The briefing you approve is the set of cards you've blessed.
That include/exclude is the whole in-portal edit surface today. If a sentence inside a card reads wrong — you know the rip is dead because you were there Wednesday; the SST line doesn't match what you saw yesterday — the current move is to drop the bad module, hit Approve, and correct it in your own email before forwarding. A free-form "tell Sedna how to tweak it" chat pinned under the module stack is on the build list — see Coming Soon below.
Hit Approve. Choose email, text, or both. Sedna sends a clean copy to your inbox and saves the briefing to your Trip Reports for future reference. Forward it from your own email to crew, clients, or anyone else who needs to see it — the copy you forward reads as coming from you, not from Sedna.
What the briefing is reasoning against
A single @Desk briefing pulls from every tool covered in the intel suite tutorial, composed against your vessel profile:
- Your profile — range, hull, electronics, targets, permits — sets the envelope of what the briefing can even recommend.
- Current SST fields — inshore or offshore depending on your target — tell her where the edge is this week.
- Bathymetric and BSR — tell her which structure near that edge fits the species and the tide.
- Fleet intel — tells her whether the network has confirmed the picture her models are drawing, or whether she's working from models alone.
- Solunar — gives her the feeding window she anchors the departure time against.
That's why two captains requesting a briefing for "Saturday, striped bass, Block Island" at the same moment get two different briefings. The boats are different. The ports are different. The profiles weight the same data differently.
The forwarded briefing is the single best pre-trip tool you've got for managing clients.
You get a briefing for yourself — same as any captain, same value. Your plan for tomorrow, built for the boat you actually run.
And you get a briefing you can forward to your clients. Guests who read a real briefing before they drive to the dock behave differently on the boat. They show up with the right expectations about size class and bite window. They ask better questions. When the first cove doesn't produce at 6:30 a.m. and you move, they treat it as the plan adjusting rather than something going wrong — because the briefing told them the plan had conditional branches in it.
Charter captains across the network have told us the same thing: the briefing isn't a marketing piece, it's a trip piece. It reduces the morning friction, sets expectations, and shows up looking like the pro they hired.
Things that trip up new captains
- Thin profile, thin briefing. If your vessel profile is half-filled, the briefing hedges. Go back to the profile tutorial and fill in what's missing — the @Desk output improves the next time you request.
- Asking for too broad a trip. "Saturday, anything that's biting" gets you a generic briefing. "Saturday, looking for a keeper striper with my father-in-law, leaving Snug at 5:30" gets you a plan.
- Not using the notes field. It's the most under-used input. That's where you tell her the trip is a birthday present, or the client wants pictures for the wall, or you want to be back at the dock by 11 because your kid's soccer game is at 1. All of it shapes the briefing.
- Requesting too late. The briefing is composed in minutes, but you want time to read it, push back if something's off, and get it to your crew. Thursday night for a Saturday trip is the sweet spot.