There’s an App for that …

We’ve read in the news about storms Austen and Boelo battering parts of the UK. Knowing a storm was coming as we left A Coruña last month, and the ferocity of it, was thanks to information gleaned from various wind and weather Apps. Dave’s primarily using WindGuru (not strictly an App but it works like one) and I look at PredictWind. They show the forecast strength and direction of the wind over the upcoming two weeks. So we knew we needed to be safely tied up in a protected harbour. 

Red = Wild Winds! (we were the little white dot) 

“There's an app for that" is the famous, now trademarked, slogan that launched Apples’ marketing campaign for their 3G App Store in 2009. There are currently over 2 million Apps in the App Store and a few of them are proving very useful for us.

Digital Cruising & Information Guides

I’m familiar with using Seachforsites and Park4night Apps to find places to stay in our campervan and there’s a few Apps doing a similar job for yachties. Noforeignland and Navily are two I’ve downloaded for free and I’m slowly finding my way around the various functions. Photographs, user reviews and information about anchorages and marinas are really helpful for route planning. The ability to book a mooring space in advance, at no extra cost, offered us great reassurance for our arrival at Muxia. We didn’t want to turn up, knowing the storm was approaching, only to find out there was no room for us.

Navigation

You used to have to buy paper charts for every cruising area you intended visiting, but the days of physical charts are definitely numbered. The UK Hydrographic Office had planned to stop printing and updating paper Admiralty charts at the end of 2026, but they’ve had to extend this to 2030, due to concerns from various stakeholders in the marine industry, like the RYA whose training course syllabus currently still uses paper charts alongside digital systems.

Dave started sailing over 40 years ago and all his qualifications and sea miles experience, up until very recently, would have been done using charts, tide tables, parallel rules, dividers and a hand bearing compass. A new skill set is required today as eNavigation and digital passage planning becomes the norm. 

When we crossed the Atlantic in 1984, before GPS was available to the general public, we navigated using a sextant and dead reckoning. Colin, our skipper, who was a first mate British Merchant Seaman, tried to teach Dave and I the basics of celestial navigation. It’s the one and only time in my life that the trigonometry I did in A level maths has ever come in useful, using sine, cosine, and tangent tables alongside sight reduction and air tables. There seemed to be endless calculations, paperwork and books everywhere.

Dave pays a subscription to Navionics/Garmin for access to online digital charts, and the software is updated frequently. Up until a couple of weeks ago we had two active subscriptions, the most recent one we purchased was a year’s access to ‘charts’ covering the English Channel to Corsica, costing £50. Next year we’ll need to purchase another subscription for the Eastern Mediterranean. 

Keeping in contact / Being visible 

When we’re in range of mobile masts 5G is fast and readily available in Europe - even when we’re a few miles offshore. But once we’re further out at sea then AIS (Automatic Identification System) comes into its own and a variety of Apps allow tracking of vessels which have AIS fitted and, importantly, switched on. 

For a small vessel like ours it does rely on there being other vessels around to relay our GPS information via VHF. All very technical but it’s a useful tool to enable us to monitor shipping around us and for our family and friends to keep an eye on where we are. 

90/180 Days

A very useful App but one I least like using is the ‘180 Days Schengen Calculator’. When you input your EU arrival and departure dates it calculates your Days Used / Days Left in a rolling period for the previous 180 days to ensure that you do not overstay your allowed 90 days. When we made landfall in Spain we were asked a few times by Passport Police in various ports about when we arrived in EU and how long we were staying, they seem less bothered now we’re in the Mediterranean. I’m hoping when we check-in at Paris for our Eurostar train back to the UK that our entry in A Coruña was properly recorded.

Seascape gets 18 months free ‘Temporary Admission’ into Europe. When we go into Turkey that EU period will end. On checking back into Greece, Seascape gets another 18 months ‘Temporary Admission’. I was considering personally re-identifying as a boat but Google AI tells me …. “You cannot literally or legally identify as a boat because you are a human person, not a floating watercraft”. 🙄