Who is behind Gleamfind

I'm Paweł, a PADI diving instructor. I'm happiest outdoors, and happiest of all when I come home with something I found myself.

I dive in the Baltic and look for amber on the beach after storms. In autumn I go mushroom picking, in winter and spring I walk the forest looking for shed antlers. Sometimes I come back with a good photo, sometimes with a fossil from below a cliff. Some finds are worth money, others are simply a good dinner, like a cauliflower mushroom straight from the pine forest.

I like going further too: a trip to Morocco and surfing its waves, diving in Bali and in Egypt with dugongs, digging razor clams on Jersey at low tide, searching for ocean sunfish. Add skiing, kayaking and simply walking around places nature shaped in its own way, like the Organy Myśliborskie basalt columns in Poland or the stone formations of Bulgaria.

I'm also a beekeeper and a dad. The best adventures are family ones: my wife and kids dive too.

What Gleamfind is for

For people who look for adventure, sometimes close to home and in simple ways, sometimes further away. General weather forecasts do not answer the questions I ask before every trip: has the sea given up amber today, are the mushrooms up after that rain, will there be an aurora tonight, when will the tide drop lowest. Gleamfind works that out for me and for you.

How the forecasts work

We pull weather, marine and solar activity data from Open-Meteo and NOAA. Each activity has its own model: waves and storms for amber, sea glass and fossils, rain and soil moisture for mushrooms, the Kp index and clouds for the aurora, tides for rockpooling. The weights are preliminary, and we calibrate them with reports of finds, including empty-handed ones.

For every spot we say what is allowed and what is not. We check the rules against sources and cite them in the guides, but always follow local signs.