About SanCap365
Conditions for Sanibel and Captiva, rebuilt three times a day, and the island directories that go with them.
What this is
Every morning this site reads the tide, the wind, the water temperature and the state red tide sampling, and lays out what today is like on the islands. It says where the numbers came from and when they were taken, because a reading with no source is a guess with better typography.
Around that sit the things you look up once you are here, or deciding to come:
- 55places to eat
- 16island shops
- 7fishing charters
- 735trades and services
- 8beaches
- 12live cameras
- 26pieces of gear
What it will not do
Nobody pays to be listed, and nobody can. Not a restaurant, not a charter captain, not a contractor. A directory that charges for inclusion stops being worth reading, and there is no version of this where that changes quietly.
It does not take a booking or a commission on one. Every listing links straight to the business, or gives you its number. What happens next is between you and them.
It does not follow you. No analytics script, no cookies of ours, no advertising network, and no page on this site makes an automatic request to anyone else. The privacy page has the detail, including the one page that carries affiliate links and what they are.
It does not fill a gap with a plausible number. When a source is down or its reading is too old to stand behind, the page says the reading is unavailable and why, rather than showing yesterday's and hoping.
How it is made
The pages are built three times a day — 5:30am, 11am and 6:30pm Eastern — and every value is fetched, checked against a freshness limit and written into the page before it reaches you. Nothing is computed in your browser, which is why the site is quick and why your visit is not reported to a weather company.
Tides come from NOAA, red tide from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, wind and sky from the National Weather Service. Each panel names its own source and the time of its reading.
The twelve cameras are the one exception to the no-outside-requests rule, and only four of them can be played here at all. None of them loads until you press play — arriving on that page contacts nobody.
How current it is
Contact details for 480 of the 735 trades and services were checked by hand; the remaining 255 came from lists compiled after Hurricane Ian and are labelled as unverified on the card itself. That label is not decoration. An island directory assembled after a storm will contain businesses that did not come back, and saying which entries we have stood behind is more useful than implying we stood behind all of them.
Who makes it
SanCap365 is the hub of a small family of Sanibel and Captiva sites that share one tide engine and one set of sources, so a tide published on one is the tide published on the others. ShellSanibel reads the same beaches for shelling and publishes a new read every morning. FishSanCap covers the fishing.
Corrections
If something here is wrong — a business that has closed, a number that does not connect, a reading that does not match what you saw — it is worth telling us, and it is the most useful thing anyone sends this site. Say what you found, or write to mike@sancap365.com.
Corrections are not published and are never passed to the business concerned. For anything about privacy specifically, ask directly.