LedgeSafe

Inspiration

Rock fishing is one of the most dangerous recreational activities in Australia, and drowning deaths unfortunately occur every year. As avid rock fishermen ourselves, we were frustrated by how often tragedies shake our community. Many incidents happen because anglers underestimate conditions like swell, tide, or the shape of the coastline. We wanted to build a tool that helps people make safer decisions before they even step onto the rocks.

What it does

LedgeSafe is a mobile app that helps rock fishermen assess the safety of fishing locations in real time. By analysing environmental factors such as tide movements, swell conditions, and coastal geometry, our custom algorithm generates a 24-hour risk score for rock fishing ledges.

The app also provides an AI-powered safety assessment that translates complex ocean and weather data into clear guidance, helping anglers understand when and why conditions may be dangerous before they even arrive.

For experienced fishermen, detailed weather and ocean data is available for deeper analysis. Users can also save their favourite fishing spots for quick safety checks, and access an education hub with guides and news to stay informed about rock fishing safety and regulations.

How we built it

We built LedgeSafe as a mobile application using React Native, allowing us to rapidly prototype a cross-platform experience.

The app integrates weather and ocean data APIs to retrieve environmental conditions such as swell and tide information. Our custom algorithm processes this data alongside geographic information about coastal formations to generate a location-specific risk score.

We also leveraged backend services such as Firebase to handle data storage, authentication, and app functionality efficiently, allowing us to focus on building the core safety features.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was finding high-fidelity weather and ocean data. Many APIs provide conditions at a broad regional level, but we wanted location-specific insights for individual rock ledges, which required creative workarounds.

Another challenge was calculating coastal geometries. The shape and orientation of a coastline can significantly influence how waves interact with a ledge, and incorporating this into our risk scoring model required additional geographic analysis

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first hackathon, and we are incredibly proud that we were able to build a working product centred around something we are genuinely passionate about.

We’re also proud of how well we collaborated as a team under tight time constraints, managing to design, build, and demo a full-stack application within a short timeframe.

What we learned

This project gave us valuable experience working across the full stack, from frontend mobile development to backend integrations and data processing.

We also learned how to leverage existing technologies efficiently, such as Firebase and external APIs, to accelerate development and focus our efforts on the core idea.