Frequently Asked Questions

MySailingPlan is a personalized sailing conditions platform for Chesapeake Bay. It goes beyond a standard weather forecast by telling you what the conditions actually mean for your specific boat, rig, and crew.

The free tier gives you live wind, tides, and forecasts for 6 Chesapeake Bay locations. The paid tier ($9/month) adds boat-specific analysis including go/no-go recommendations, sailability scoring, depth windows, crew safety assessments, AI Briefing, and sail recommendations.

No. The free dashboard requires no account, no sign-up, and no email. Just open it and pick a location. You get live wind and gust readings, NOAA tides and water levels, and a 5-day forecast — completely free, forever.

You only need an account if you want the paid features tied to your specific boat.

The free tier covers 6 locations across Chesapeake Bay. All weather data comes directly from NOAA stations and forecasts, so you're getting the same data the National Weather Service publishes — just presented in a format built for sailors.

Click "Get started" on the homepage or go directly to the onboarding page. You'll walk through a quick setup: enter your boat details (name, make, keel type, draft), add your sails, and create your account. Payment is handled securely through Stripe.

The free tier is $0 forever — no credit card, no catch. Your Boat is $9/month or $90/year. AI Briefing is included — no add-ons, no separate plans. Annual billing saves about 17%. Each subscription covers one boat.

Each account supports one boat. This keeps your boat's data, settings, and subscription tied to a single vessel — no confusion about which boat is active. If you have multiple boats, you'll need a separate account for each, with its own subscription.

If you signed up before August 2026 and already have multiple boats on one account, your existing boats remain accessible — you just won't be able to add new ones.

Annual subscribers who join starting 1 July 2026 through the first launch year earn the Plank Owner designation — a naval tradition for crew members present when a ship is first commissioned. It's our way of recognizing founding supporters.

You can cancel anytime from your account settings. Your paid features remain active until the end of your current billing period. Payments are handled through Stripe, so you can also manage your subscription directly through the Stripe customer portal.

During onboarding you'll enter your boat's name, make, model, keel type, and draft. You can also add dimensions (LOA, beam, displacement), engine horsepower, and tank capacities. The more detail you provide, the more accurate your conditions analysis will be — but only the basics are required to get started.

Crew mode lets you tell MySailingPlan whether you'll be sailing solo, double-handed, or fully crewed. This changes the safety and comfort calculations — for example, solo sailing in stronger winds receives a lower sailability score and stronger safety advisories than the same conditions with a full crew.

The sailability score is a 0–100 composite rating that combines three factors: speed potential (up to 50 points, based on how close conditions are to your boat's optimal polar performance), comfort (up to 30 points, accounting for wind, waves, and current opposition), and weather (up to 20 points, including precipitation, visibility, and temperature). A higher score means better conditions for your boat and crew.

Yes. Every paid boat gets its own URL at yourboatname.mysailingplan.com. You can bookmark it, share it with your crew, or pull it up on any device. It goes straight to your boat's personalized dashboard.

Tip: Bookmark your boat URL on your phone's home screen for one-tap access from the dock.

You can. Add each sail you own — mainsail, genoa, jib, spinnaker, storm jib — along with details like reef points, LP percentage, and sail area. MySailingPlan uses this to give you specific sail recommendations based on current wind conditions, including when to reef.

All weather data comes directly from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Wind, tides, water levels, and forecasts are pulled from NOAA stations and the National Weather Service API. No third-party weather vendors, no paywalled data — just the official government source, formatted for sailors.

Polar data describes your boat's theoretical speed at different wind speeds and angles. MySailingPlan uses bilinear interpolation across your polar grid to estimate how fast your boat should go in any given conditions. This powers the sailability score, VMG (Velocity Made Good) calculations, and optimal angle recommendations.

You can use default polars, import data from the ORC database (which has thousands of rated boats), or enter custom values if you've done your own performance testing.

Default polar: If you don't add polar data, MySailingPlan uses a generic 30ft cruising boat polar (similar to a Catalina 30 or Pearson 28). This covers wind speeds from 6-20 knots across all sailing angles. It's adequate for cruisers but may overestimate speed for heavy-displacement boats or underestimate for light,performance boats.

Depth windows calculate when it's safe for your boat to navigate shallow areas, based on your keel draft plus a safety margin. MySailingPlan scans NOAA's 6-minute tide predictions and returns the time windows when water levels provide enough clearance. This is especially useful on the Chesapeake Bay, where many anchorages and marina approaches are tide-sensitive.

Current opposition occurs when the wind blows against the tidal current — for example, a southerly wind during an ebb tide flowing south-southeast on the Chesapeake Bay. This creates steep, uncomfortable chop that's disproportionate to the wind speed. MySailingPlan detects these conditions automatically and factors them into your comfort score.

The crew preparedness module assesses hypothermia risk (low, moderate, high, or critical), recommends PFD usage, suggests appropriate clothing layers, and calculates wind chill using the NWS formula. These recommendations adjust based on your crew mode — solo sailors get more conservative advisories.

MySailingPlan uses wind-speed brackets — light air, moderate, strong, and storm — combined with your actual sail inventory to recommend which sails to fly and when to reef. If you've added your sails with reef points, you'll get specific advice like "Main with 1st reef + working jib" rather than generic wind ranges.

Departure windows tell you the best time to leave the dock. MySailingPlan scans the next 72 hours of NOAA hourly wind forecasts and scores every 3-hour departure slot. A high-score window means you'd hit favorable wind for most of your trip. A low score means you'd be fighting headwinds or dealing with fluky conditions.

The safe harbor router finds the closest protected anchorages and marinas near your route. If conditions worsen mid-trip, it shows you where to duck in, how far it is, and what protection level to expect. It factors in wind direction to identify anchorages sheltered from the current breeze. Tide-adjusted depth is also available — pass includeTideAdjustedDepth=true to see how current water levels affect each anchorage's minimum depth.

Depth and draft data are not factored into safe harbor recommendations. Always consult your charts and local knowledge before committing to an unfamiliar anchorage.

The route planner uses weather routing (isochrone method) to find the fastest course between two points. It considers your boat's polar data, forecasted wind, and tidal currents to suggest a route. Each leg of the suggested route shows expected apparent wind, boat speed, and heading. Currently available on the full dashboard — mobile support is in development.

Yes. You can invite crew members to your boat's dashboard with different permission levels: captain (can plan trips), crew (can view conditions), or viewer (read-only). Each person gets their own login and sees only what their role allows. This is great for sharing pre-departure briefings with your crew or letting family check your position.

The pre-departure checklist on your dashboard lets you run through key items before casting off — life jackets, VHF radio, engine checks, and more. It's a simple browser-based checklist to help you stay organized before a trip. We recommend filing a separate float plan with someone ashore; checklists inside the app are not shared externally.

Passwords are salted and hashed using scrypt. Login attempts are rate-limited to prevent brute force attacks. If too many failed attempts are detected, additional CAPTCHA verification is required. All sessions are signed and expire 30 days after sign-in.

On the sign-in page, click "Forgot password?" and enter your email address. You'll receive a reset link to create a new password.

No. MySailingPlan does not sell your data. During sign-up you can opt into the mailing list. We store what's needed to run your dashboard: your email, boat details, sail inventory, and — if you add crew or subscribe — phone numbers (with SMS consent), subscription details, and AI briefing preferences. See our privacy policy for the full list.

MySailingPlan pulls data from NOAA in real time. Occasionally, NOAA stations experience outages or delayed reporting — this is outside our control. If data seems stale, try refreshing the page. If the issue persists, the NOAA station itself may be temporarily offline.

Make sure you're using the correct URL format: yourboatname.mysailingplan.com. If you recently created your boat, it may take a moment for the subdomain to become active. Try clearing your browser cache or using an incognito window. If the problem continues, contact us at [email protected].

Yes. MySailingPlan is fully responsive and works in any modern mobile browser. For quick access, bookmark your boat's subdomain or the free dashboard to your phone's home screen — it'll work like an app without needing to install anything.

No. MySailingPlan is a planning aid, not a substitute for official NOAA charts, National Weather Service forecasts, Coast Guard notices, or a licensed captain's judgment. Always verify conditions through official sources before departure. The captain alone is responsible for the safety of the vessel, crew, and passengers. MySailingPlan and Rhumbline Maritime LLC assume no liability for decisions made based on this service.

Yes — the Tolchester Sailing Dashboard, the open-source predecessor to this site, is available on GitHub: github.com/rikt46/chesapeake-sailing-dashboard. It's a personal, single-page sailing dashboard for a Pearson 31-2 on the upper Chesapeake Bay that pulls live wind, tide, current, weather, and notice-to-mariners data from public NOAA / NWS / EPA / USCG feeds and turns it into an at-a-glance go / reduce-sail / no-go recommendation tuned to the boat's polars.

It's MIT-licensed, a static site — plain HTML, CSS, and vanilla ES-module JavaScript, no backend and no build step — and it's free to fork and make your own.

The repo is built around a vanilla JS ES-module frontend (no framework, no bundler) where the browser fetches directly from NOAA Tides & Currents, weather.gov (NWS), NDBC, EPA UV, and USCG feeds — none of it transits a backend. It includes polar-tuned sail recommendations, a color-coded 5-day outlook, and Pearson 31-2 polar reference sheets.

There's a live demo at dashboard.sailingaurora.com.

The whole AWS footprint is Terraform in the repo's infra/ directory. In short:

1. cp infra/terraform.tfvars.example infra/terraform.tfvars and fill in your own domain_name, route53_zone_id, region, etc. (terraform.tfvars is gitignored — keep your real values out of version control).
2. cd infra && terraform init && terraform apply.
3. Run deploy.sh locally, or set up the optional GitHub Actions automation described in docs/AUTOMATION.md.

There's no dev server — open index.html in a browser, or serve the directory with any static file server. The public repo ships no GitHub Actions workflows, so nothing deploys automatically when you fork it; the deploy and chart-cache automation are provided as copy-paste templates.

MySailingPlan is the commercial evolution of that project — it adds accounts and crew, per-boat personalization (your draft, sail inventory, and polars), trip planning and briefings, departure windows, safe harbor routing, AI briefings, and multi-boat support, all backed by a managed backend. The open-source project is the lightweight, self-hostable starting point: single boat, single page, no account required.