BUOY.fish Launches Publicly
BUOY.fish is now commercially available. After a year of research, development, and testing, our GPS-enabled smart buoys are ready for fishermen who want to know where their gear is — and keep it from becoming ghost gear.
How We Got Here
BUOY.fish started under the Golden Gate Bridge, where co-founder Jameson Buffmire lost his first crab pot. He thought he was just careless — but it turns out lost gear is one of the biggest environmental problems in commercial fishing. Research in Science Advances estimates more than 25 million pots and traps are lost to the ocean annually. In the Mid-Atlantic alone, derelict crab pots kill an estimated 3.3 million blue crabs each year.
Jameson co-owns AINU, a 22-foot commercial fishing vessel in San Francisco with salmon and groundfish permits. Co-founder Tal McGowan studied Fisheries Biology at the University of Tasmania and holds an MBA from Deakin University. Together, they founded BUOY.fish in 2023 with a simple premise: if we can track packages, pets, and cars, we should be able to track fishing gear.
Why Not Satellite?
Several companies have tried satellite-based tracking for fishing gear. The technology works, but the economics don't — a single satellite buoy can exceed $2,000 in hardware with $30-100/month in service fees. A traditional fishing buoy costs about $10. No fisherman is going to attach a $2,000 tracker to a $10 buoy.
BUOY.fish uses LoRaWAN — a low-power, long-range wireless protocol — to transmit GPS coordinates over 30+ miles of open ocean at a fraction of a cent per data packet. No cellular plan, no satellite subscription. The result is a smart buoy that's economically viable for commercial fishing, not just research projects.
First Sales
In Q1 2024, we made our first commercial sale to Bay Area Dungeness crab fishermen. California's Department of Fish and Wildlife has approved BUOY.fish technology for deployment in the California Dungeness Crab fishery — and our tracking system has already been used to identify and apprehend a poacher who removed trackable units from the water.
What's Next
We're preparing for our first large-scale deployment in partnership with the Global Ghost Gear Initiative, targeting the spiny lobster fishery in Baja California, Mexico. If you're a commercial fisherman, a fisheries organization, or anyone who cares about keeping our oceans free of ghost gear — we'd love to hear from you.
Try the live demo to see the tracking platform in action.
