DriftWatch vs TideRoute Sailing

DriftWatch is a captain's best friend for a good night of sleep. Often the captain sets anchor for the night and keep waking up regularly to confirm that the anchor is still preventing the boat from drifting. Some boats/yachts have anchor alarm on their GPS system. Unfortunately, it is not rare that the integrated GPS system is inaudible from the captain's bed. With DriftWatch running on your IOS device, you can have it near your bed and be confident that it will warn you if you drift outside of the established boundary. DriftWatch is the perfect complementary mean that provides peace of mind when anchored. DriftWatch is simple and easy to use. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: Your IOS device should be connected and charging when using DriftWatch for an extended period of time either as a foreground or background application. The application keeps monitoring your location using the device's GPS which drains the battery faster than normal. Fortunately DriftWatch monitors your battery level and alerts you when a certain battery level is reached when unplugged.

TideRoute Sailing plans and runs your passages, under sail or under power: routing, multi-model GRIB, current and tide, ORC polars, marine charts. Free to start. THE ROUTING, AND WHY IT IS FASTER Draw your route, pick a departure time, run the calculation. The isochrone algorithm looks for the fastest track from your polar, the wind, the swell, the current, the day/night cycle and your motoring rules, while clearing the coast. The calculation advances by successive fronts, discarding the positions with no future. A classic router keeps, per sector, only the one furthest from the start. Upwind that criterion turns against you: the tack that gains towards the mark is not the one that goes furthest away — it gets discarded, and the route commits to a long losing board. Here each front keeps both, the most advanced and the closest to the finish. Measured on Groix-Ouessant, same GRIB and same polar, 100 % sailing: 16 h 57 for 100 miles, against 20 h 40 for 152 miles on a well-established consumer router. Three hours forty less, 18 %. The gap comes from the algorithm, not from the engine. AND FOR MOTORBOATS Raise the "Motor below" setting above any speed under sail and enter your motoring speed: the routing becomes a power calculation, current, tide, swell and coastline included. Against a 5-knot tidal race, an 8-knot motor cruiser stakes its day on the time of passage. THE CURRENT IS PART OF THE CALCULATION Current is not a decorative overlay: it enters the routing. Useful wind is taken in the water frame, and speed over ground follows. • From the Baltic to the Mediterranean, 412 current areas of at least 1 knot, surveyed over a full spring cycle • Fine mesh where current makes the day: our own 100 m model on the English coast, Ifremer 250 m in Brittany and the Channel, BSH on the Elbe and the Belts, Copernicus Marine elsewhere • Tide computed on board: heights, high and low waters, at any date, with no network • Best departure time: a sweep compares the departures in your window and keeps the one that passes the races at the right moment WEATHER AND MODELS • ECMWF and GFS offshore, up to 10 and 16 days • AROME 1.3 km and ARPEGE 0.1° (Meteo-France), ICON-EU 7 km and ICON-D2 2.2 km (DWD) • The finest model for the area is offered; the GRIB follows the extent of your route THE SOLENT, MODELLED FOR ITSELF General-purpose current sources work on a 1.5 km grid — three cells across a channel three miles wide. We built our own: a hydrodynamic model of the Solent, the Isle of Wight, Hurst and the Needles on a 100 m mesh. Developed with AI assistance, from open data, checked against published tide gauge records. Harmonic tide: currents for any date, months ahead. YOUR POLAR, MEASURED UNDER WAY Start from the monohull and multihull library, from the ORC database — thousands of certified boats — or from your own CSV and .pol files. Then build your own at sea. The capture workshop (experimental) fills an angle / wind-speed grid cell by cell as you sail: it waits for a settled regime, discards the minutes after a manoeuvre, flags doubtful cells. Interpolate the gaps, correct by hand, merge outings, export to .pol or .csv. That is your boat, not the sister-ship's. The display then puts your speed against the target: 96 % upwind, you are still looking; 103 %, you are holding the right trim. ON BOARD • Instrument display (NMEA 0183, Signal K) • Alarms: anchor drag, shallow water, strong wind, cross-track error, battery • AIS, tracks, passage table, GPX export • OpenStreetMap and OpenSeaMap charts: marks, soundings, seagrass • Offline: cached charts, GRIB kept on board, tide computed without network • Comparator: overlay several routings and replay them GFS wind routing is free, without limit. Auto-renewing subscription: it renews unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the period, and can be managed in your App Store account settings. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/