Why this is the loop that matters
Every briefing Sedna writes for you — and every briefing she writes for the rest of the fleet — leans on catch data. What's being caught, where, at what temperature, on what bait, by which hull in which conditions. The forecasts compound when the data comes in. They go stale when it doesn't.
The old solution was "please log your trips." Nobody does. The captains who meant to do it got halfway through their first season, and then August happened. What changed with @Dock isn't the idea of logging — it's the cost. The cost is one photo per fish, one email per angler. That's it. Your phone was already in your pocket; the camera is already open half the time anyway.
The three-step flow
One photo per fish, with the angler who caught it holding the fish. Use your phone's camera app — no app install, no tagging, no fiddling. The photo carries the GPS coordinates and the timestamp automatically, which is what Sedna keys on. A clean shot at the rail beats a staged one at the dock; conditions at the catch point are the data that matters.
If you're the captain running solo with clients and can't always be the one shooting, hand the phone to the mate or to another guest — the photo metadata doesn't care who pressed the button.
At the dock or on the drive home, attach all the photos for one angler and send them in a single email to sedna@zsoffshore.life. Put the angler's name in the subject line — that's how Sedna personalizes the card she sends back.
Multiple anglers on the trip? One email per angler, each with their name in the subject and their fish attached. The email must be sent from the captain's registered email address — or from a registered crew member of the same vessel, sent from their own registered email. That's how Sedna authenticates the trip and attributes the catch to your boat. A guest who took photos on their phone should AirDrop or text them to someone registered to the vessel, who then sends from their own account.
From each photo, Sedna pulls GPS and timestamp, identifies the species (AI), estimates the size and weight from the photo, and looks up the conditions at that location and time — SST, tide, wind, sea state, solunar phase. Within minutes you and the angler each get:
- An Angler Card — a branded, per-angler report card carrying the catch photo, species, size, weight, method, and conditions. Sent directly to the angler's email.
- A Captain's Report — the full trip summary, sent to you: total catch by species, a map of the day, conditions, bite windows, and the catch log rolled up trip-by-trip.
- A confirmation email — Sedna flags any species ID she isn't sure about and asks you to confirm. Reply with a correction if she got one wrong; the log updates and she learns your water better for next time.
Where the data lands
Everything that comes out of a trip shows up in your portal automatically:
- Catch Log — every fish, by trip, with species, size, location, conditions, and the photo.
- Reports — the Captain's Report for each trip plus a rolling season view.
- My Trips — the trip map, the fishing window, and the link between the pre-trip briefing and what actually happened.
The closed loop — @Desk before, @Dock after, linked to the same trip — is what lets Sedna say, at the end of a season, "your August tuna runs produced best on the day after a barometric drop with a 72°F break north of the canyon." That's not a generic tip. It's yours, pulled out of your own season.
The Angler Card is built to double as a marketing asset.
An Angler Card carries the guest's fish, the trip conditions, your vessel name, your vessel photo, and your captain photo. It lands in the guest's inbox by the time they're finishing dinner. The idea: a card is more likely to get posted, forwarded, or framed than a phone full of loose photos — and your brand is on every one of them. Whether that translates into bookings is something each captain's own season will tell; the first full year of the network running will be the first real dataset on it.
The practical note: make sure your vessel photo and captain photo are clean in your profile. That's what shows up on every card your boat produces, so the quality of those two images sets the ceiling on how well the card represents your boat.
Things that trip up new captains
- Location services off. If your phone's camera doesn't have location enabled, the photo has no GPS and Sedna has to guess which trip it came from. Check the setting once and forget it.
- Missing subject line. A photo sent with no subject lands in review, not in an Angler Card. Put the angler's name in the subject every time — muscle memory, two weeks in.
- Batching a month of trips. You can send a stack from an older trip and Sedna will process it, but the card is most valuable the night of the trip. Guests who get a card at 9 p.m. on Saturday react differently than guests who get a card on Tuesday.
- Not correcting a misidentified species. She'll flag the ones she isn't sure about. Reply with the correction — it takes ten seconds and it makes the next identification more accurate for your water.