New voyage planning tool for cruisers

[SailingBosse]

Hi everyone — I'm Bosse, a cruising and racing sailor from northern Germany. I want to share something I've been building and would genuinely love your feedback on it.

When I started planning an Atlantic crossing last year, I kept running into the same problem: there's no good way to visualize the statistical wind and current picture along a planned route. The classic pilot charts are brilliant, but they're static books — you can't trace your own waypoints through them, compare months, or ask "what if I leave two weeks later?"

So I built Horizory.com — a free web app that brings pilot chart data to life on an interactive map.

What it currently does:

→ Wind rose overlays for every ocean grid point, selectable by month (10 years of ERA5 climatology)
→ Ocean currents
→ Tropical storm risk zones and historical cyclone tracks
→ Route planner: place waypoints, get wind angle and Beaufort distribution per leg
→ Upload your boat's polar diagram → estimated passage time per leg

It's built specifically for the planning phase — weeks or months before departure — not for real-time routing. The idea is that you sit down with a rough itinerary idea and the app helps you stress-test it against the climatological picture.

It's completely free, no account needed to explore. I'm still actively developing it and your input would genuinely shape what gets built next.

A few things I'd specifically love feedback on:
— Is the wind rose display intuitive, or confusing at first glance?
— What data layers are missing that you'd actually use?
— Does the route planner match how you actually think about passage planning?

Happy to answer any questions. And if you find a bug — please let me know!

 

[Foswick]

Nice execution. I actually considered building something like this a while back. I would be most inclined to use something like this to do rough planning for timing and approximate route where the distances between harbors is > 100 nm or so. As such, it is pretty niche, as you probably know.

So, to give you feedback, it would be useful to know your target users and use cases.

To answer your questions:

• The wind rose seems fine.
• I can't think of missing layers for something this macro. But, I wouldn't find depth charts useful at this level of planning. I might not find seamarkers useful either. Those are things that I would look at when doing more detailed planning.
• This kind of matches my thought process. I want to specify my approximate route, then look month-by-month at major expected climate conditions. The system handles this well.

Where it doesn't quite do what I would want is adjust over time on a long trip. Let's say I want to leave from Vancouver Island (Canada) to French Polynesia, some route to Japan, and back. The ideal time to make my way down the west coast of the U.S. is around May/June. But, my window to get across storm tracks closes shortly after that. Then, I will likely want to wait in French Polynesia until about mid-January. Since all of these passages take time, and the overall trip requires waiting out storms for extended periods, that means that the trip's climate picture is different for different parts of the trip.

The system will handle this if the user knows about how long a leg will take and just estimates in which month they will be on each leg.

I see this as most useful specifically for isolated legs of a trip that will definitely be done in one direct shot.

 

[dLj]

I'll give you my two cents worth - if it's worth that much...
2 caveats:

1) I didn't look at your program, I'm basing this strictly on your description
2) While I'm not a "ludite", I'm also not a big fan of more apps and more things I need internet access to use.

What it currently does:

→ Wind rose overlays for every ocean grid point, selectable by month (10 years of ERA5 climatology)
→ Ocean currents
→ Tropical storm risk zones and historical cyclone tracks
→ Route planner: place waypoints, get wind angle and Beaufort distribution per leg
→ Upload your boat's polar diagram → estimated passage time per leg

All of the above I am already pretty well versed in. What I'm not seeing that would be really useful for me are the regulations.

I have a boat flagged in (put in your country). I'm planning to go to (Country A, Country B... etc.)

How much does it cost to check in? How long can I stay? Are there different time frames and do I need to state one or the other at first check in?

How possible is it to extend or not?

Sailing around in the country, do I have to check in and out of every port or???

It's built specifically for the planning phase — weeks or months before departure — not for real-time routing. The idea is that you sit down with a rough itinerary idea and the app helps you stress-test it against the climatological picture.

Without the regulations, I can do the planning phase myself easily. Climatology, currents, travel time - I've already got all I need.

It's completely free, no account needed to explore. I'm still actively developing it and your input would genuinely shape what gets built next.

A few things I'd specifically love feedback on:
— Is the wind rose display intuitive, or confusing at first glance?
— What data layers are missing that you'd actually use?
— Does the route planner match how you actually think about passage planning?

Happy to answer any questions. And if you find a bug — please let me know!

Can't answer any of the above as I didn't look.

dj

 

[jssailem]

Interesting project.

Its use was not intuitive to me. I tried to click on the demo route, but all that happened was that I created more waypoints. I could not delete the new waypoints. I did manage to get the wind rose to pop-up a page, but ran into the color and size issue of the displayed rose that made it difficult to understand the information.

Looking at the colors on the charts (the use of black when using an Apple MacBook in classic color setup) made much of the page unreadable.

Choosing to plot a course and understand general wind conditions has very little utility. Historical data is available from many sources. Using an app to decide to go or no go in November or October is better accomplished by reviewing the Pilot book information on general sea conditions.

When planning 2 weeks in advance to cross the Atlantic, I would rather use powerful weather-included charting software like LuckGrib.

I wish you success. I did not find enough in the application to become a user at this time.

 

[SailingBosse]

Thanks for your analysis! I tried to implement this feature but for sure have to make it easier to use and then take more time to explain it in the intro.
Cheers, Bosse

Where it doesn't quite do what I would want is adjust over time on a long trip. Let's say I want to leave from Vancouver Island (Canada) to French Polynesia, some route to Japan, and back. The ideal time to make my way down the west coast of the U.S. is around May/June. But, my window to get across storm tracks closes shortly after that. Then, I will likely want to wait in French Polynesia until about mid-January. Since all of these passages take time, and the overall trip requires waiting out storms for extended periods, that means that the trip's climate picture is different for different parts of the trip.

 

[SailingBosse]

I have a boat flagged in (put in your country). I'm planning to go to (Country A, Country B... etc.)

How much does it cost to check in? How long can I stay? Are there different time frames and do I need to state one or the other at first check in?

How possible is it to extend or not?

Sailing around in the country, do I have to check in and out of every port or???

Yes, this is the tedious part of the cruising preparation but also has to be taken into account. I also thought about implementing some legal information but havent yet figured out, where I would get the data from. One option would be to start entering some info by hand and later on allow the community to add infos... Not really sure yet, if that is an elegant solution.
Thanks a lot for your thoughts!

 

[SailingBosse]

Looking at the colors on the charts (the use of black when using an Apple MacBook in classic color setup) made much of the page unreadable.

Hello, thanks for your feedback. This is new to me, since I only tested it on Windows... Great info, I will have to check on how to fix this.

 

[dLj]

Yes, this is the tedious part of the cruising preparation but also has to be taken into account. I also thought about implementing some legal information but havent yet figured out, where I would get the data from. One option would be to start entering some info by hand and later on allow the community to add infos... Not really sure yet, if that is an elegant solution.
Thanks a lot for your thoughts!

I get that data through Noonsite. It's the best resource that I'm aware of. When traveling, I get a paid subscription as that allows unlimited access. And it's really inexpensive.

My question to you, is why aren't you teaming up with some of the more established resources out there and working with those resources to build a better centralized resource that becomes a better point of access for cruisers? I seem to see all sorts of these small standalone apps that do some specific aspect recently. I've seen numerous folks asking - "Hey check out what I've done here - give me feedback." I'm not trying to be critical here - just giving feedback.

Why aren't you talking with Noonsite, or OpenCPN, or No Foreign Land or one of these established groups that could use added functionality? Why are you trying to do this seemingly just on your own?

Just a question.

dj

 

[Captain Larry-DH]

I'll give you my two cents worth - if it's worth that much...
2 caveats:

1) I didn't look at your program, I'm basing this strictly on your description
2) While I'm not a "ludite", I'm also not a big fan of more apps and more things I need internet access to use.



All of the above I am already pretty well versed in. What I'm not seeing that would be really useful for me are the regulations.

I have a boat flagged in (put in your country). I'm planning to go to (Country A, Country B... etc.)

How much does it cost to check in? How long can I stay? Are there different time frames and do I need to state one or the other at first check in?

How possible is it to extend or not?

Sailing around in the country, do I have to check in and out of every port or???



Without the regulations, I can do the planning phase myself easily. Climatology, currents, travel time - I've already got all I need.



Can't answer any of the above as I didn't look.

dj

Noonsite.com has a lot of that info