Mark Pellerin is a life-long boater—sail and power—who has spent a substantial amount of time on the ocean and inland waterways. As a U.S. Coast Guard-licensed captain, he operates a yacht management business with boats in Maryland and Maine, and also takes clients out for day sails for tours or instruction. He is also involved in real estate and in sales, specializing in marina and other commercial/industrial valuations.
Pellerin uses CBIBS—most often via the website but also on his smartphone using a mobile app—to monitor Bay weather. He’ll also often send his boating friends links with data and warnings.
“I did quite a few sailing charters last summer out of a very fancy place in St. Michaels and I used the combo [CBIBS data and also radar] to decide if we were going be safe...or not!” he explained. “I am convinced that the public living in the Chesapeake area can benefit from confirming the weather broadcaster’s ‘trending weather’ by seeing ‘real data.’”
He checks conditions at the Gooses Reef and Annapolis buoys most frequently because they are closest to where he lives and sails from. Wind speed and direction, air temperature, and water temperature are all important as he makes decisions about how to plan his day.
Interestingly, he has also used salinity data from CBIBS to help solve a mystery about why bottom paint wasn’t sticking well to a very expensive boat. It turns out salinity levels where the boat spent a bunch of time weren’t a good match for that paint.
Pellerin learned about accessing data from up and down the Bay from CBIBS through a "small world" connection. “I first learned about CBIBS as a yacht delivery skipper. I had become very accustomed to making use of similar data from GOMOS (in the Gulf of Maine) and other offshore buoys” as he delivered boats from Maryland to Maine and around Long Island Sound.
He mentioned to his nephew how useful he found data from buoys—and his nephew told him about the Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System. Turns out his nephew is on the ace CBIBS IT team!
With the IT expert on board, Pellerin has just started to develop his own website.