Read the
living ocean.

Open the Layers drawer from the stacked-layers icon in the left rail and scroll to the OCEANCAST group. It folds open and shut from its title, a count on the header tells you how many of its layers are on, and the line under the header sums up how it's set (palette, isolines, linework, currents style).

Everything that configures OceanCast lives behind the gear on the group header. Everything you turn on is a row underneath it. Each row has a small (i) next to its status — tap it for the built-in layer guide: what the layer shows, every source under it, how it's made and how to fish it.

Tap a row to turn it on. It expands to show a source picker and an opacity slider: the same variable from different producers, at different resolutions. Only one source per row shows at a time, so switching is one tap and the status line under the row tells you which is up and how often it updates.

Sources tagged NEW are the AI layers. A source you switch on always comes up at full opacity; drag the slider down if you want the bathymetry to show through.

No single satellite sees the whole ocean clearly — cloud blocks the sharp ones, the ones that see through cloud are blurry, and the daily products are yesterday's news. Every hour the OceanCast AI blends them all into one seamless temperature map on a 500 m grid, then does the same for chlorophyll. The map you see is about three hours behind real time, carries about a day of history, and runs 24 hours ahead as a forecast.

Switch 500 m AI on under Sea surface temperature and two things happen: the map redraws at a detail the 8 km model can't show, and an AI track appears in the time bar at the bottom of the map (step 9). Forecast hours show amber on that track. The first time you play it the map says “Give us a minute to load” while it fetches every frame and traces its lines — after that it plays without stutter.

Open the gear and set AI LINEWORK to Fronts. Instead of isolines, the AI traces the sharpest edges in the temperature (or chlorophyll) field and grades them by strength. A second control, FRONTS, shows the major fronts only (the default) or all of them.

A major front carries a white coin with its jump in degrees — ΔT 1.4°C — that always turns to face you however you rotate or tilt the map. On chlorophyll the coin shows how many times richer the green side is, like ×4.9. Pink lines are major, yellow medium, white minor; chlorophyll fronts are green dashes.

Around every front is a red band with a red coin on a bar: ±6 km. That is how far the front could sit either side of the line. The band is worked out stretch by stretch — it pulls in where the edge is crisp and widens where it's gradual or under lingering cloud. For forecast hours it is measured, not modelled: the typical miss between a forecast front and where the front was later found, about 4 km at +12 h and 5 km at +24 h.

The first row in the gear is the PALETTE, and it's one setting for every OceanCast layer — SST, the AI SST and the currents' shaded speed map alike. It's the difference between reading absolute temperatures, reading edges, and reading your numbers.

Full maps the whole palette across its designed span. A colour means the same temperature everywhere, every day — the palette is tuned for the AU east-coast pelagic bite breaks, with its own colour step at 22 / 24 / 26°C, so Full is how you spot an absolute target temperature.

Dynamic (the default) stretches that same palette to fit only the temperatures on screen. The readout beside the toggle (e.g. 18.9° – 23.8°C) is the current stretch. Squeeze the full colour range into a narrow band and the faintest half-degree edge pops. It re-stretches every time you pan or zoom — and in a tilted 3D view it fits the water in front of the camera, not the haze on the horizon. The one time it holds still is a timelapse: press play and the stretch is pinned to the first frame for the whole run (the readout says pinned for playback), so a front moving through the week changes colour because the water did, not because the range drifted under it.

Custom is your own range. Pick it and three pairs of boxes appear under the pills — SST min and max in °C, currents in knots, chl-a in mg/m³ — and the whole palette stretches across whatever you type, on every layer, every day, until you change it. The boxes start from what Dynamic was showing, so the quick way to set one is to frame the water you care about on Dynamic, switch to Custom and round the numbers off. Use it to hold the bite-break band you're hunting (say 21 – 25°C) across a week of frames or between sessions, where Full is too coarse and Dynamic keeps moving the goalposts. Your numbers are remembered on this device.

Zoomed in (left, z10) only a patch of the shelf edge is on screen, so the range is tight — here 21.0° – 22.7°C — and the whole palette spreads across that sliver, exaggerating every tendril of warmer water. Zoomed out (right, z6) the view covers the whole system, the range widens to 17.9° – 24.4°C, and the palette spreads across the big picture — cool inshore water, the warm EAC offshore, and the fronts between.

With ISOLINES on in the gear, the map traces lines of equal value over whichever OceanCast layer you pick from the list beside it — temperature, chlorophyll, sea level, current speed or wind speed. Dashed magenta lines are the minor steps, solid white the major, each labelled along the line. Where the lines bunch together the water is changing fast: that's your break.

Two things to know. While an OceanCast layer is on, the depth contours step back to charcoal so the water linework reads as the foreground — a grey line is depth, a white or magenta line is water. And while an AI layer is on, its own linework takes precedence (so set AI linework to Isolines if you want contours on the AI field rather than fronts).

Temperature tells you where the edge is; currents tell you which way the water's pushing. Turn on the Currents row and pick Total (hourly, tide included — the default) or Ocean (the background flow). The CURRENTS setting in the gear picks how the flow is drawn, and the real choice is what happens to the SST underneath.

Particles animate the flow — thousands of streaks drift along the current so you can feel the direction and pace. Drawn purely over the top, so your SST colour stays fully visible.

Shaded lays down its own colour raster: current speed as a heatmap with white arrows for direction. It paints the whole area, so it sits over the SST and hides it — the colours now mean speed, not temperature. It follows the Full / Dynamic palette setting like everything else.

Arrows has no raster — a clean grid of arrows on the screen, each tinted by speed and pointing the way the water moves, drawn beneath the isolines so neither hides the other. The grid rebuilds as you zoom, so the field stays readable at every scale, and it stops at the coast.

The Wind row is new. It's the wind 10 m above the sea from Google's WeatherNext 3 AI weather model: hourly for the next two days, then every three hours out to 15 days, on a grid about 11 km across. It rides the same AI track as the temperature and chlorophyll and runs on past their 24 hours.

Colour is speed in knots, with most of the palette spent on 0–20 kn where the fishing decisions get made — a new hue every 2.5 kn, orange at 20, red and magenta beyond 40. It has the same three styles as the currents (the WIND row in the gear): Shaded is the default, Arrows keeps the temperature readable, Particles drifts streaks with the wind. Tap the map for the speed and the direction it's blowing from. Isolines on wind run every 2.5 kn.

OceanCast doesn't just show now. Whenever a layer with a time axis is on, a time bar floats at the bottom centre of the map: a DAY row and an HOUR row of slots, a readout of the hour showing, a NORMAL / FAST speed toggle and play. Hourly layers open on the latest hour available; tap any slot to jump.

There are two tracks. The satellite forecast track steps the 8 km SST, sea level and the currents through the week ahead. The AI track steps the AI layers through the last day and the next — forecast hours amber — and on past that for the wind. When both apply they stack, AI on top. Hit play and the map crossfades frame to frame; the isolines and fronts change with every frame, while a Dynamic palette stays pinned to the first frame's range (step 5) so the colours only move when the water does.

Every time on the bar, in the readouts and on the chart is in the TIME ZONE set in the gear — AEST by default, with the daylight-saving zones switching clocks on their own. Set it once to where you fish and leave it; Reset to defaults never touches it.

Want the numbers for one exact spot rather than the whole map? Tap a waypoint to select it, then tap the graph icon in the top info dash. OceanCast pulls the forecast for that precise location and plots it on a chart.

The chart plots the days ahead with a dual scale — temperature (°C) on the left, current speed (kn) or chlorophyll on the right — so they sit on the one timeline. With an AI layer on, its series joins the chart too: the recent history solid, the forecast half dashed. Tap the expand icon to maximise it, then hover or scrub the timeline to read the exact value at any hour. It's the fastest way to answer “what will it be doing here on Sunday morning?”

Flip Bathymetry to 3D, tilt the map and the OceanCast layers keep working. The DISPLAY setting in the gear picks how they sit on the terrain. Top (the default) draws them flat at sea level, so the land rises through them and the water reads like a chart laid on the sea. Draped wraps them over the seabed relief like the shaded relief itself, so a temperature break follows the slope it sits on. Arrows stay flat on the terrain either way.

Draped is the heavier of the two on a phone; if playback stutters, switch back to Top.

Lost track of what a source is or how to fish it? Tap the (i) on any OceanCast row. The layer guide opens with what the category shows, then a card for every source under it — grid, time steps, forecast, delay, how it's made in plain words, why use it and what to keep in mind — with the one showing now marked. The Bathymetry and Contour lines rows have the same.

And if you've been fiddling: Reset to defaults at the foot of the gear puts the palette back to Dynamic (your Custom numbers are kept for next time), isolines on, AI linework to isolines (fronts to major only when you switch them on), Top display, particles for the currents and shaded for the wind. Layers that are on stay on; your time zone stays put.