AFTWISE Boat smarter. Live freer.
Cruising & the Great Loop

A summer or a year. Six hundred miles or six thousand. One record.

Cruising is not one big decision. It is a season of small ones, made twice a day, mostly by two people who are also cooking dinner and finding a marina — a summer on the Chesapeake, a winter in the Bahamas, the ICW south and back, or the Great Loop, which is a year of them and well over a hundred locks.

Cruisers already know the failure mode. Week three, the log is meticulous. Week twelve, it is a notes app. By Demopolis, nobody can remember when the port impeller was changed, whether the generator oil was done in Chicago or Joliet, or what fuel actually cost in Kentucky.

Not because anyone stopped caring. Because the record was extra work laid on top of an already full day.

AFTWISE is built so the record is a by-product of the day rather than an addition to it. You run the lock. The lock is logged. You do the hourly check. The check writes the log, and the engine hours it captures move the next oil change forward on their own.

Locks & Bridges (Cruiser)

The lock is the day’s real schedule

Everything else on a river day bends around when you can lock through. AFTWISE treats that as the planning problem it is.

  • Lock and bridge directory with the details you need before you call: dimensions, contact, VHF channel
  • Service patterns — on demand, every thirty minutes, on the hour, a repeating interval, a scheduled opening, by reservation — so you know whether arriving at 4:40 means locking at 5:00 or at 8:00 tomorrow
  • Sequenced against the trip, in order
  • Timing entries recorded as you go, which is how you learn what your boat actually does on that river
  • Share as text to the person meeting you at the next marina
  • ETA Window Check with linked reminder tasks, plus PDF and CSV passage packages (Captain)
A trawler tied against the wall of a river lock, a crew member on the side deck tending a line to a bollard, the lock gates closed ahead and the wet concrete walls rising on both sides with the water part-way down
In the appLock & bridge directory
Underway

Two taps at the top of the hour

The point of an hourly check is not paperwork. It is that you notice the transmission temperature has been creeping for three hours before it becomes a tow.

And while you are running, the trip map draws your fuel as three rings — turn back, range to reserve and dry tanks — redrawable at any throttle setting in your burn curve. How range rings work

Hourly Checks (Cruiser)

Engine temperatures and pressures, fuel state, bilge, steering, and anything else you decide matters — captured on the interval you choose, with the numbers kept so a trend is visible rather than remembered.

Reminders are optional: switch them on for a trip, pick an interval from thirty minutes to two hours, and the notice offers Log Check or Snooze. They stop when the trip ends. A new check fills in its own position and the marine weather as it opens, when AFTWISE already has permission to use your location, and leaves anything you typed alone. Choose Readings for This Boat turns off the readings a boat does not have.

Captain Log (Cruiser)

Watchstanders, conditions and events in a proper log. Hourly checks and route tracking write their own entries, each stamped with where it came from, so what you type by hand is the part that needed a human.

People & Crew

Who is aboard for this leg, with emergency contacts and the details a manifest needs. Import from Apple Contacts rather than typing your regular crew in again; one directory of people and marine contacts serves every boat you keep.

Media & Vlogs (Cruiser)

For the boats that film: project plans tied to the trip, each with its shot list, signed release forms for the people in frame, camera gear with its cards and mounts, and project exports when you get to the edit.

Routes & GPX

Keep the navigation app you already like

Chartplotters and navigation apps save routes as GPX files — Navionics, Aqua Map, OpenCPN, Garmin, Raymarine, Simrad. AFTWISE reads those files. A route off your plotter, or a leg another boater sent you, comes in and gets measured against your boat, and the routes you record go back out in the same format. AFTWISE is not a chartplotter and does not try to be one.

  1. Start with a file you already have. Every chartplotter and navigation app reads and writes GPX — Navionics, Aqua Map, OpenCPN, Garmin, Raymarine, Simrad. Legs also arrive by email or message from other boaters, or from a published route library.
  2. Send it to AFTWISE. In Aqua Map or Navionics, select the route and share it to AFTWISE.
    In detail

    On a Mac, open the .gpx with AFTWISE. Or go to Trips and use Import a Route from a GPX File, which opens the file picker directly.

  3. It arrives as a planned trip, dated a week ahead as a placeholder, with the trip notes recording where the file came from.
    In detail

    An imported leg is a reference, not a record of a passage your boat made, and AFTWISE files it as one.

  4. It gets thinned, and the arithmetic is shown. A track sampled once a second runs to tens of thousands of points.
    In detail

    One 77-mile leg arrived as 29,409 positions and reduced to about 258 — a change of a third of one percent in the measured distance. The channel bends survive, and your original file is left untouched.

  5. Read the leg against your boat. Distance measured along the route’s actual positions, with the straight-line figure shown beside it for comparison.
    In detail

    Hours at the cruise speed you recorded. Fuel at the burn you recorded, against your usable fuel with your reserve held back — worked on the route distance rather than the straight line, because a straight line understates a winding leg and would flatter the range. And the locks and bridges from the AFTWISE directory that fall on the route, in order, with the channel to call.

  6. Take your own routes with you. Any trip with a recorded route exports as standard GPX 1.1 and opens in a chartplotter, Navionics, Aqua Map or OpenCPN. Your route, your file.
  7. Or hand somebody a picture of the passage. The same trip also writes a Google Earth file — a .kmz Google Earth opens directly — with the recorded track drawn as a line and a marker at each end.
    In detail

    The markers read Departed and Arrived, each carrying the time it was recorded so the direction of travel reads at a glance. That one is a map overlay for looking at and sending on, not a route to steer.

In the appThis Leg card

A leg read against the boat, on a trip that carries a route. Distance follows the route’s own positions rather than a straight line; the hours and the fuel come from the cruise speed and burn rate that owner recorded. The footnote is the app’s, not ours — and this leg genuinely has no locks on it, which is the answer the directory should give when that is true.

In the appLock information sheet

One structure from the directory, as it appears on the leg. AFTWISE does not fetch a live operating status and says so on the sheet — it gives you the official sources to check, then records what you found and when, so the trip shows who checked and on what date.

A route records itself while you are under way — and iOS decides how much of it you get. When it asks about location, While using the app keeps the track running while a trip you started is recording, screen locked or another app in front. Always does one more thing: it lets a recording that is still running resume after the app has been closed or the phone restarted, which is the difference between a full passage and the part before you swiped the app away. Either can be changed later in Settings.

Three things worth saying plainly. Every figure here is one of your own: if you have not recorded a cruise speed or a burn rate, AFTWISE says so and shows nothing rather than inventing a number. And the lock and bridge directory holds 203 structures, 135 of them with coordinates — concentrated on the Erie, Champlain, Oswego, Illinois, Tennessee and Tenn-Tom systems and the lift bridges. The Florida ICW’s bascule bridges are barely in it yet, one so far, so a leg there can correctly come back with no locks or bridges on it.

AFTWISE does not provide navigation or steering guidance. It never gives a course to steer, never sequences a turn, and never instructs you to follow any line on a map. It answers how far, how long, how much fuel, and what you will have to call.

AFTWISE ships no route files of its own. The routes in your copy are the ones you recorded or chose to bring in.

Built for this route

The cruising and trawler checklist library

Cruiser includes procedures written for this kind of boating rather than generic templates: lock approach and transit, low-bridge and air-draft checks, anchoring, fuel-dock procedure, long-passage pre-departure, and the seasonal work that comes with a year afloat.

These checklists are examples to start from, not official or approved procedures. You decide what is right for your boat, your crew and your waters: change any step, add your own, or delete what does not apply. Follow your manufacturer’s instructions, the law, and your own judgment.

How checklists run
Where you actually are

Most of where you actually cruise has no signal worth having

Seven manuals ship inside the app and open offline, and your record is on the device itself rather than fetched from a server — it syncs through your own iCloud when there is signal and works without it when there is not, which is most of where you cruise.

The manuals Get started