The rule before we go through them
Every dashboard in the sidebar is a lens. Sedna already reads through those lenses when she composes a briefing for you — that's what the inference tutorial was about. The reason the dashboards are surfaced as their own tools is that there are moments when you want to look through a specific lens yourself, before you ask her anything. Not to do her job. To sharpen the question you're about to ask.
Read this tutorial once, then come back to it when a specific dashboard shows up in a briefing and you want to know what she was looking at. You will not use every tool every trip. The captains who get the most out of the suite are the ones who learn which lens fits which decision.
The six lenses, in the order you'll reach for them
This is the front door. Ninety percent of what a captain needs from the portal starts with a sentence typed into chat: "Saturday, leaving Snug at 5, want to put my nephew on his first keeper — where do I start?" Sedna composes the answer against everything below — your vessel profile, the current SST field, fleet activity, the solunar window, bottom structure near your port. The chat is the place where the whole suite comes together.
When to reach for it: first. Always first. If your question fits in a sentence, ask it here before you open anything else. She will tell you which dashboards she pulled from, and you can drill into them from there.
The bottom. Depth contours, canyon walls, ridges, shoals, wrecks. The nearshore atlas is tuned for the inside run — reefs, rockpiles, the structure a bass-and-tog captain actually fishes. The offshore atlas is the canyon system — Hudson, Block, Wilmington, Baltimore — with the contour resolution you need to read an eddy boundary or a canyon shoulder.
When to reach for it: when you're picking a spot, not a species. You already know you're chasing tog tomorrow — you want to eyeball the rock pile east of the breachway versus the wrecks off Newport. Bathymetric is the lens that answers that question faster than chat will.
The Co-Captains network logs what it catches, where, and how. Fleet Intel is the rolled-up view — recent reports, species by area, what's producing this week. It is the closest thing to standing on the dock at 4 p.m. and hearing five captains talk about their day, except it's aggregated and time-stamped and doesn't rely on anyone being honest with a stranger.
When to reach for it: when you need confirmation. You've drawn a plan for Saturday, you want to see whether the network was already producing there this week. Or the inverse — a window just opened, you don't know where the push is, fleet intel tells you which area lit up last.
Sea surface temperature, broken out by the fisheries that actually care about which edge you're working. Shark focuses on the mid-shelf temperature bands where mako and thresher concentrate. Tuna focuses on canyon-edge thermal breaks and eddy boundaries. Pelagic is wider-aperture — billfish and mahi work off different features than tuna do. Inshore is the bass/blue/fluke/tog band — the water inside the shelf, with the resolution tight enough to see a breachway push.
When to reach for it: when temperature is the deciding variable. Spring migration — watching Watch Hill touch 54°F is the whole game. August offshore — you want to see where the 72°F line is running versus last week. Sedna uses these automatically; you open them when you want to see the picture she's reading from.
The structure layer. Wrecks, rockpiles, humps, lumps, canyon shoulders — each with a report on what the structure is, what it produces, what season it produces in, and what the network has logged there. BSR is the library of why this spot works rather than just where this spot is.
When to reach for it: when you're considering a new piece of bottom. You heard about a rockpile from another captain; you want to know whether Sedna has a report on it before you run out there and burn half a tank. Or you're planning a trip to unfamiliar water and you want the structure briefed before you ask her for a plan.
Moon phase, sun position, and the major/minor feeding windows for any day you're looking at. Not the only input that matters — you're still a captain, not an astrologer — but the variable that flips a lot of marginal days into good ones. Especially in spring and fall, when the fish are moving and a well-timed major window is the difference between a scouting trip and a working trip.
When to reach for it: when you're deciding when, not where. Two days off this weekend, the weather is fine on both — solunar tells you which one gets the better window over your home water.
How they stack in a real briefing
A Saturday @Desk briefing for a twenty-two foot center console out of Snug Harbor in mid-May pulls from every one of the tools above, whether or not you open any of them yourself:
- Your vessel profile — range, hull, electronics, target species — sets the frame.
- Bathymetric — the SW Ledge rather than the North Rip, because the rip has been patchy and the Ledge structure lines up with this weekend's current.
- Fleet Intel — three boats in the network produced keepers on the Ledge yesterday; no one reported the North Rip.
- SST Inshore — Watch Hill Reef just touched 54°F, the push is through.
- BSR — the Ledge report flags the bunker pods that show on the south edge when water first warms; that's what the network is keying on.
- Solunar — Saturday's major window opens at 7:14 a.m. with the flood, which is why the briefing says leave at 6:00.
You open the sidebar if you want to see any of that layered out in a chart. You don't need to — the briefing is already reasoning against all six lenses. But knowing they're there means when you read "bunker pods on the south edge" in your briefing, you know you can open BSR and see the report she was citing.
The Fleet Intel + Solunar combo is your client-management tool.
The conversation every charter captain has, over and over: the client wants to go Saturday, and Saturday is a ten-out-of-ten weather day with a six-out-of-ten solunar window. Sunday is a seven-on-the-weather, but the major window hits at sunrise and the network has been producing at that time. You know Sunday is the better trip. The client doesn't, because all he sees is the weather app on his phone.
Open Fleet Intel and Solunar side by side and you are not arguing with the client anymore — you're showing him the reasoning. "Here's what produced yesterday. Here's where the window opens Sunday versus Saturday. Here's why I'd rather run Sunday with you and trade a foot of sea state for a bite." Clients who see the data stop second-guessing the call. And the ones who overrule you anyway now do it with their eyes open, which changes the morning conversation if the trip goes sideways.
It is, for a lot of charter captains, the single most valuable lens in the suite.
A simple decision tree
If you want a working shortcut for when to open what, this is the one most captains settle into after a month:
- Start in chat. Every trip question starts here. The briefing or the answer will cite the dashboards it drew from.
- Open the dashboard it cited when you want to see the picture yourself — confirm it, get a feel for it, or spot something else it didn't flag.
- Open BSR or Bathymetric directly when you're shopping a spot and you don't have a plan yet — looking for structure, not a species.
- Open Fleet Intel + Solunar when you're weighing which day or selling a plan to a paying client.
- Open an SST dashboard when the temperature question is the whole question — spring migration, eddy work, a thermal break you're watching.