What is Wadden Current?

Wadden Current is a small, volunteer-run open data dashboard for the Den Helder–Texel ferry corridor. We aggregate publicly available marine feeds — tides, wind, water temperature, ferry status — and present them in a single calm view, refreshed every thirty seconds.

Why it exists

The data you see on this page is already public. The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) publishes weather observations. Rijkswaterstaat publishes tide gauge readings. The ferry operator publishes a schedule. Maritime AIS publishes vessel positions. But to look up all of these, one has to open four or five different websites — none of which is built for the kind of person who just wants to know if the boat will leave on time.

We built Wadden Current as a one-screen answer to that question. It is an evening project that grew, slowly, into a small public utility.

Who runs it

The dashboard is maintained by the Wadden Current Collective — a small group of developers, marine scientists and ferry commuters based in Den Helder, North Holland and Texel. Nobody is paid. Server costs are covered by a single annual €240 invoice paid by one of the founders, and by a small donation jar that keeps us in coffee.

# A note on independence. Wadden Current is not affiliated with the ferry operator. We don't sell tickets. We don't run ads. We don't take affiliate commissions on bookings made elsewhere. If we ever did, the project would no longer be Wadden Current.

How it works, technically

A small Go service polls each upstream feed at its native cadence (30 s for tides and weather, 60 s for ferry status).
Results are cached in Redis with a tight TTL, then served as JSON.
The HTML dashboard you are looking at is a static page that pulls those values via a tiny JavaScript snippet — about 4 KB on first paint, no third-party scripts.
The entire stack runs on a single 4 GB virtual machine hosted in the Netherlands.

What we won't do

We won't ever add advertising.
We won't ever embed third-party tracking.
We won't ever sell user data; we don't collect any to begin with.
We won't add features that compete with the ferry operator's official channels — we exist alongside them, not against them.

Roadmap (loose)

We are slowly adding an archive view (so you can look at last week's tide curve), a winter ice indicator (relevant maybe four days a year), and a JSON-only endpoint for anyone who wants to plug our data into their own dashboard. There is no fixed release schedule. We ship when something is ready.