A tech exec uses AI to build the kind of business AI can't deliver.
All-electric catamaran charter operation in the Pacific Northwest — Gulf Islands and San Juan Islands. AI runs the operations. Humans deliver the experience.
📺 @sailingnaturali on YouTube · sailingnaturali on Substack · sailingnaturali.com · @sailingnaturali on Instagram · @sailingnaturali on TikTok
On-boat AI agent system — Navigator, Engineer, Logbook — wired to the vessel through SignalK and MCP servers. The agents are the product; the runtime underneath is replaceable and has already been replaced once.
| Repo | What it does |
|---|---|
| signalk-mcp | Read live vessel data from SignalK — wind, depth, position, battery, route — with path discovery and under-keel clearance |
| weather-mcp | Marine wind, swell, and buoy observations — Open-Meteo + Stormglass + NDBC |
| currents-mcp | Tidal-gate slack windows for PNW passages — CHS (BC) + NOAA (US) current predictions |
| pilotbook-mcp | Rank the most comfortable overnight anchorage by joining pilot-book exposure against the forecast — and search anchorages in plain language ("quiet spot to wait out a southerly with a beach") via on-device hybrid retrieval |
| colregs-mcp | Navigation rules of the road — resolve the regime by GPS, look up rules, and check lights/shapes compliance |
| logbook-mcp | The ship's log as agent tools — voice-marked moments and day reads over the signalk-logbook plugin, with USCG/TC sea-time export on the roadmap |
| vessel-knowledge-mcp | Turn equipment manuals into alarm zones and equipment lookups — ingests PDFs into a card vault, pushes zone bands into SignalK so it raises notifications autonomously, then explains them in plain language |
| club-moorage-mcp | Find and overnight-rank yacht-club outstations — RVYC member moorage with size, rafting, and booking rules, ranked against the forecast by reusing pilotbook-mcp's anchorage scorer |
Knowledge bases the MCP servers read from.
| Repo | What it holds |
|---|---|
| colregs-vault | Navigation-rules content for colregs-mcp — rule prose, a curated requirements decision table, and PNW regime polygons. Public because the sources are reproducible public-domain law |
| currents-vault | Tidal-gate reference for currents-mcp — one file per PNW pass with CHS/NOAA station identity plus flood/ebb hazard notes (whirlpools, holes, sets), and a destination routing table. Public: station data is open government, hazards are paraphrased |
pilotbook-vault (private) |
Anchorage knowledge for pilotbook-mcp — 673 anchorages across 7 SalishSeaPilot books, with exposed-sector data and source page back-links. Kept private: the source pilot books are copyrighted |
vessel-knowledge-vault (private) |
Equipment cards for vessel-knowledge-mcp — per-make/model spec cards extracted from manuals (propulsion drives, Victron Cerbo, watermaker), with zone bands in SignalK canonical SI units. Kept private: the source manuals are copyrighted |
Run inside the SignalK server itself — alarms and data feeds that don't wait for an agent. Published on npm under @sailingnaturali.
| Repo | npm | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| signalk-notification-router | @sailingnaturali/signalk-notification-router |
Route SignalK notifications to MQTT, a Telegram siren, and an agent webhook — two push lanes with independent failure modes, edge-triggered, severity-aware |
| signalk-currents | @sailingnaturali/signalk-currents |
Publish CHS/NOAA tidal-current predictions to SignalK — interpolated environment.current at the vessel plus a /currents slack/flood/ebb event series, for a configured station list |
| signalk-depth-offsets | @sailingnaturali/signalk-depth-offsets |
Derive environment.depth.belowKeel and belowSurface from a DBT-only sounder using measured transducer offsets — zero dependencies |
| signalk-dsc | @sailingnaturali/signalk-dsc |
Receive, log, and alert on DSC (VHF digital selective calling) calls — distress, urgency, safety, routine — from NMEA 0183 ($CDDSC/$CDDSE) and NMEA 2000 (PGN 129808) |
| signalk-ais-distress | @sailingnaturali/signalk-ais-distress |
Alert on AIS distress beacons — SART, MOB, and EPIRB survival devices (MMSI 970/972/974) — with emergency notifications, chart markers, a forensic log, and a ship's-log entry |
| signalk-journey-replay | @sailingnaturali/signalk-journey-replay |
Replay published voyage data (journey-data archives) on any SignalK server — download a trip, press play, timestamps rebased to now |
| signalk-equipment-registry | @sailingnaturali/signalk-equipment-registry |
Serve a vessel equipment registry — manufacturer/model/serial per installed instance, plus the SignalK paths each owns — at resources/equipment, the identity slot SignalK's schema lacks |
| Repo | What it does |
|---|---|
| naturali-agents | Agent skills for Navigator, Engineer, and Logbook — shared persona, prompts, the Poseidon daemon, and HA voice integration |
| journey-data | Real voyage data from S/V Naturali as SignalK delta archives — capture, scrub, and publish CLI; the archives signalk-journey-replay plays back |
| claude-skills | Claude Code skills from this build — /plugin marketplace add sailingnaturali/claude-skills |
Extracted so several consumers reuse one implementation instead of duplicating it. Libraries, not installable plugins — the SignalK plugins above and the MCP servers import them.
| Repo | What it does |
|---|---|
| vault-search | Local-first hybrid search over the Markdown vaults — BM25 + on-device embeddings (fastembed/ONNX) in one SQLite file, RRF-fused. The retrieval engine behind pilotbook-mcp's plain-language anchorage search |
| marine-forecast | Shared Open-Meteo marine + wind forecast fetch, extracted from weather-mcp so it and pilotbook-mcp compose one forecast implementation instead of duplicating it |
| signalk-distress-core | Shared distress plumbing (@sailingnaturali/signalk-distress-core) — event store, chart-marker builder, spoken/logbook rendering, and notifications — extracted from signalk-dsc so it and signalk-ais-distress share one implementation |
| naturali-mcp-netutil | Tiny shared network helpers for the MCP fleet — resolves .local mDNS hosts to IPv4 at the URL boundary so SignalK reads don't hang on macOS Happy-Eyeballs |
The rule here is adopt before build — the repos above exist only because nothing else filled the gap. Most of what makes this boat work is other people's open source:
| Project | Role aboard |
|---|---|
| Signal K | The open marine data bus — every sensor, plugin, and agent reads and writes here |
| Home Assistant | Voice in/out, dashboards, and automations — the crew-facing surface |
| signalk-logbook | The ship's log itself — logbook-mcp and signalk-dsc write to it rather than reinventing it |
| signalk-tides | Tide extremes at the vessel — we send patches upstream instead of forking |
| openmeteo-provider-plugin | Free Open-Meteo forecasts into SignalK's weather API — we contributed the marine waves & swell (water.*) the point forecast was missing |
| signalk-restricted-areas | ProtectedSeas marine-protected-area layers and geofence alerts — MPAs, rockfish conservation areas, whale slowdown zones |
| Eclipse Mosquitto | The MQTT spine — alarms, intents, and voice events between boat, agent host, and Home Assistant |
| Whisper / Piper | Speech-to-text and text-to-speech for the voice pipeline, both running locally |
| Ollama | Local inference for small structured tasks — e.g. repairing model output into strict JSON |
| Tailscale | Remote access to boat and shore hosts — WireGuard without the key ceremony |
When one of these falls short we file an issue or send a patch before writing a replacement. A new repo in the tables above is the last resort.
Off the boat — the trip-content side. Standalone and useful on their own.
| Repo | What it does |
|---|---|
| flight-animator | Animate multi-stop flight routes on a dark MapLibre map — great-circle arcs, animated trail, no server or sign-in. Built to screen-record and narrate for the Amsterdam boat-build trip videos · flights.sailingnaturali.com |
| flighty-mcp | Read-only MCP server exposing personal Flighty flight history as geo-ready legs (departure/arrival coordinates) — query by date, year, or flight number, and browse aggregate stats |
Open, standalone — usable in any app or agent. Most of this line now lives in Open Waters, the collaboration org where the shared marine data work is maintained.
| Repo | What it does |
|---|---|
| slackwater-engine | Pure-Swift offline harmonic tide & current engine — heights and the high/low turns for any minute, years ahead, with zero network. Faithful port of neaps, validated against NOAA's own published predictions to a few minutes and centimetres. MIT |
| slackwater-web | Archived, unmaintained. Offline tide predictions for the Salish Sea as an installable web app — no account, no network needed once loaded. Still served at slackwater.sailingnaturali.com; Slackwater continues as a native iOS app |
| chs-constituents | Fit tidal-current harmonic constituents for Canadian (CHS) stations from IWLS predictions (@sailingnaturali/chs-constituents) — out-of-sample validation, confidence tiering, per-gate training-window selection. A pipeline instead of a dataset: the CHS licence forbids redistributing derived data, so you run it yourself and offline prediction follows. MIT |
| noaa-current-stations | NOAA CO-OPS tidal-current station data (@openwaters/noaa-current-stations) — fetcher, extractor, schema, and the API's undocumented behaviour. The public-domain constituent source behind signalk-currents' offline fallback |
| station-metadata | Provider-neutral station identity for tide and current apps (@openwaters/station-metadata) — stable keys and slugs, readable names and context, search aliases, positions corrected off dry land, and current-gate / tide-port relationships. A corrections overlay enriches provider records; the registry defines stations with no upstream identity to correct. Corrections are one-line pull requests. MIT |
Three replaceable layers. An agent reads vessel + environment data through MCP servers, reasons over it, and speaks back through Home Assistant.
Interaction Home Assistant
voice in ──MQTT──▶ │ ◀──MQTT── Piper TTS out
▼
Agent runtime Poseidon daemon (Mac Studio)
Claude today — local model when the boat can power it
│
┌──────────┬──────────┼──────────┬──────────┬─────────┬──────────────┬───────────────┐
Tool surface ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼
signalk weather currents pilotbook colregs logbook vessel-knowledge outstations
-mcp -mcp -mcp -mcp -mcp -mcp -mcp -mcp
│ │ │ │ │ │ │ │
Data / vaults SignalK Open-Meteo CHS + pilotbook- colregs- signalk- vessel-knowledge- RVYC data
bus NDBC NOAA vault vault logbook vault (bundled)
(on boat)
Each MCP server runs standalone and is independently useful — point your own agent
at any one of them. The vaults are plain Markdown/GeoJSON the servers read at
startup (PILOTBOOK_VAULT_PATH, COLREGS_VAULT_PATH, CURRENTS_VAULT_PATH,
VESSEL_KNOWLEDGE_VAULT_PATH). currents-mcp reads live currents from CHS/NOAA via
signalk-currents and gate/hazard reference from currents-vault.
vessel-knowledge-mcp also runs the loop in reverse: its build-time CLI pushes alarm-zone
metadata into SignalK, so the bus raises notifications on its own and the agent only
explains them.
Start at naturali-agents — the agent skills, shared persona, and daemon that wire the MCP servers into a working crew. It ships a mock SignalK server, so the loop runs on a laptop with no boat:
git clone https://github.com/sailingnaturali/naturali-agents
cd naturali-agents
python dev/mock-signalk.py # serves a Boundary Pass scenario on :8765
export SIGNALK_URL=http://localhost:8765
uv run scripts/briefing.py --dry-run # real tides + mock vessel → the Navigator's morning promptEach repo's README carries its own install, env vars, and tool surface. Every MCP
server is a uv-runnable Python package with its own test suite.
Built in public. MIT licensed. Show the receipts. The build log lives on the engineering blog (source), and the main site at sailingnaturali.com (source).