Planning a day paddleboarding can now be easier with new app that covers 183 Spanish beaches

Checking three weather apps, ringing a mate who lives by the coast, and still getting caught out by rough seas? Or filled the car with all the equipment, set up on the beach then too rough to go out? A familiar story for paddleboarding lovers.

Father’s frustration creates lightbulb moment

Abel Rodriguez, a 35-year-old engineer and paddle surf devotee from Malaga, kept asking himself the same question before every session: “¿El mar esta pa’ tabla?”  is the sea good for a board? Weather apps gave him wind speeds and swell periods, but rarely a straight answer he could act on. Worse, conditions could look perfect at home and turn within minutes of arriving on the sand. So he built PaddleGo, an app that reads wind, gusts, swell height and direction, then boils it all into a single colour.

How the traffic-light system works

Green means go, amber means proceed with caution, and red means stay on dry land. “Weather apps are built for meteorologists or wave surfers, not someone who just wants a relaxed paddle,” Rodriguez explains. Data comes from Open-Meteo’s international forecasting models, refined with years of his own on-the-water calibration, a westerly wind, he notes, behaves very differently in Pedregalejo than it does in Tarifa.

Rodriguez’s wife is from Pedregalejo, their children were born there, and every version of the app was tested on that same stretch of sand before anywhere else. “The traffic light was calibrated with hundreds of photos from this shore, laptop balanced on my knees,” he says. Coverage now runs to 183 beaches across mainland Spain, the Balearics and the Canaries, browsable by province and saveable as favourites, a figure he says grew from chasing genuine coverage rather than a target number. Impressively, the whole thing was coded in roughly three months while on paternity leave, working between feeds and nappy changes. His youngest daughter was born on the night of a full day’s paddling with the family, and paddle surf has stayed the household’s summer plan ever since — he and his wife were already out on the water together when she was pregnant with their first child. “I built the app I needed as a father,” he says.

The hidden danger paddlers should know

The app also flags offshore wind, which Rodriguez calls the sport’s quiet menace. A land breeze leaves the shoreline “flat as a plate, not a single wave, looking like the perfect day.” Paddlers drift out further than planned, pushed along by the wind, only to face an exhausting fight back against it while the beach refuses to get any closer, the exact sort of scenario behind the Manilva rescue. It also scans a 30km radius to suggest the nearest beach with the best conditions right now, offers hourly forecasts to catch a decent weather window before it closes, streams live webcams for a visual check, and lets paddlers share their location and expected return time with a contact before setting off.

Safety and common sense are still the most important factor

Rodriguez is careful not to oversell his creation. “An app doesn’t save lives; common sense does,” he insists. His hope is narrower and more personal: “If just one rescue gets avoided this summer because someone saw red and stayed home, the app’s already been worth it.”