Avoid crowded, noisy anchorages with sQuiddio's new Superyacht Dodger layer

Imagine booking an ocean-front room and discovering there is an 18 wheeler parked in front of it!

The number of superyachts, which are commonly defined as vessels over 30 meters (110 feet) long, has quadrupled in the last 30 years and there are almost 6,000 of them now at sea. You don't have to sail the French Riviera or the Florida Keys to spot one of these behemoths of the sea: they are now just about anywhere. If you are a billionaire, or are willing to shell out the $100K+ a week to charter one, or are just someone who enjoys that type of scene, have at it. After all, you have the same right to be there as the rest of us cruising mortals do.

But for most cruisers, the sight of one of these monsters approaching our anchorage to drop their anchor - often not far from where our boat is - is one of the most dreaded cruising experiences. And for good reasons: their huge silhouette can block out the beautiful scenery we had just begun to enjoy, their bright lights, often constantly on, can ruin that unique star-gazing experience we were looking forward to.  And what to say of the constant din of their generators? Or the loud parties with music blasting until the wee hours? Or the jet skis, the banana boats and the other noisy water toys which seem to be part of the standard carriage requirements for a these super stinkpots?

Finding superyacht-free anchorages

Sometimes I feel like finding an anchorage free of superyachts has become part of my standard route planning routine. And because helping with route-planning is sQuidd.io's mission, we have created the Superyacht Dodger layer: simply put, the layer will highlight all the Points of Interest (marinas, anchorages etc.) where a superyacht (or the occasional large cruise ship, another unwelcome companion of many an anchorage) is currently checked in. The presence of at least one of these types of vessels will show up in the map view as a small red icon overlaid to the POI.

Here's an example of what a section of the French Riviera around Cannes on a typical late July day appears when the layer is active. We have deliberately chosen arguably the busiest of cruising spots to show that, even in these circumstances, there is some hope of finding a reasonably quiet anchorage!.

 

As always, please let us know if you find this new feature helpful, what could be done to improve it and, in general, how you feel about this particular issue as a cruiser, by adding to the comments below.

Follow your favorite vessels around the world with sQuidd.io

If you are familiar with the sQuidd.io plugin for OpenCPN, you have probably used the popular Log Sharing feature, which allows you to follow a select number of boats around the world right on your navigation Chart, as well as send regular position updates from your own boat so that others can see where you are.

With the introduction of the new web site, we have added a couple of useful features to make the user experience a bit smoother than previously:

- the process of adding and deleting boats to your follow list has been streamlined significantly. You can now just tap on the follow this vessel button on each boat's page on squiddio (which you can locate by searching on the vessel's name or MMSI from the home page, or find in the Vessels section of a Point of Interest (POI) web page etc).  (Conversely, just tap on the Unfollow button at any time to delete the vessel from your follow list.)

- you can now follow the boats in your follow list directly on the web site, when you are not using OpenCPN. Just select the relevant option from the Layers pull down on the map in the Home Page.

Remember that you can only follow vessels that are either:

- sharing their position through the sQuidd.io OCPN plugin

- broadcasting their positions through and AIS transponder (provided the signal is picked up by an extensive network of land station)

More on how to set up and use the Vessel Follow feature on our FAQ

Not your grandfather's sQuidd.io!!

Let's face it...the squidd.io site had grown a little old and a little stale. It was high time for a change, so change it we did. And what an upgrade it is!

Take a look at the new web site: you will immediately notice an entirely new paradigm: the home page, the center of the application, has been replaced with a map that features multiple spatial data layers that can be selected on and off. 

Of course, the ever-growing repository of 30K+ navigational POIs (points of interest, such as marinas, harbors, ports, anchorages etc) is still the centerpiece of sQuiddio, but we have made it a lot easier to explore the database by dragging the map and zooming in and out.  It's also become a lot easier to add, edit and delete POIs, a process that was admittedly a bit clunky and counter intuitive in the old web site.

We have also added a number of layers that had become popular features of sQuiddio in the past, but were not available in a cohesive and comprehensive manner: satellite maps, which can now be easily downloaded in bulk for a specific area, vessels in your Follow List, which you can now create an update with just a tap (gone is the old cumbersome invitation process), weather beacons, AIS Navigation Aids etc. 

Finally, we took advantage of the redesign to make the web site a lot faster, responsive, and suitable for the variety of devices being used by the sea-going community of squiddio users.

In a nutshell....easier to use, a lot faster and more importantly, a lot more useful!

Take the new squidd.io site for a spin and send us your thoughts!