Route Planning

BoatRoutes generates routes between marinas, anchorages, and marine parks across the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. Every route is pre-computed from nautical chart data. Routes aim to follow charted water and stay clear of charted land and obstructions. They are for planning only and are not a substitute for official charts and your own judgment.

How Routes Are Generated

Our routes are built using a raster-based routing engine that operates on a navigation grid derived from NOAA Electronic Navigational Charts (ENCs). The process works like this:

Grid construction — We convert ENC chart data into a high-resolution navigation grid where each cell is classified as navigable water or land/hazard
Path finding — A Dijkstra shortest-path search walks the grid cell by cell to find the lowest-cost navigable path between every pair of locations. The cost of each step accounts for distance and for favoring open water away from shore and charted obstructions.
Variant generation — For each pair, we generate one or more route variants with different routing priorities
Distance and time calculation — Each route includes the total distance in nautical miles, which is combined with your boat speed to estimate travel time

What You See

On any location page, the Routes section lists all available routes from that location, organized in a sortable table:

Destination — the other end of the route, with a link to its location page
Distance — total route distance in nautical miles
Time — estimated travel time at your set boat speed
Current impact — a summary of how tidal currents affect the passage at your chosen departure time
Route link — click to see the full route detail page with maps and overlays

Setting Your Boat Speed

The speed control appears in the route explorer header. Use the +/- buttons or type directly to set your cruising speed in knots. All time estimates update immediately when you change the speed.

Your speed setting persists across pages during your session, so you only need to set it once.

Setting Your Departure Time

The departure time picker lets you choose when you plan to leave. This is critical because it determines the tidal current predictions shown on the route. Changing the departure time will:

Update the current overlay arrows on the route map
Recalculate the current impact summary
Shift the tide height predictions along the route

The route detail page has a Best Time to Depart panel that does this for you. It tries a full day of departure options and shows which ones give you the most help from the current. See Best Time to Depart.

Tips

Use the route explorer’s sort controls to quickly find routes by distance, time, or destination type.
When comparing routes, pay attention to the current impact column — a passage that looks shorter might take longer if you are fighting strong opposing currents.
The route explorer supports filtering by destination type (marina, anchorage, marine park).
Once you have a single leg planned, you can string several legs together into a multi-day trip. See Trip Planning & Itineraries.