How the iPhone GPS app “Boatie” saved my day (and possibly my life)
I recently went on a bit of a boys adventure which involved me, my brother in law and a mentally fast speedboat. The trip was intended to be a bit of fun combined with some drinking and fishing.
My brother in law runs a restaurant in Dunster, in Somerset near Minehead (it is called Reeves – if you are in Dunster, book. He does excellent food) So we set off from Watchet Harbour with the aim reaching Tewkesbury via the Severn river, staying two nights trying to weedle out one or two of the many salmon running this time of year and then head back. His boat sleeps two so we took all the gear to be self sufficient for a few days.
It all went according to plan except on the return leg where we exited the mouth of the Severn and entered the very wide sea-like estuary. I think it’s about 7 miles wide. Anyway, the weather was ok but rainy, an hour into the trip and it became clear that, instead of planing along at 50mph as we had on the way up, the sea state meant we could only do a few knots….this spelled disaster for fuel and pretty soon the worse of several situations hit us all at once.
So in order of things going wrong, here is what happened and how the iphone app called “Boatie” (which I had when I used to own a sailing yacht – good job I kept the app!) all the events happened in the of the channel, in the space of two minutes:
1) the inboard GPS failed so we had no idea our exact location
2) the weather turned from rain to strong wind, heavy rain and semi fog mist
3) visibility was so bad we could see no shoreline or way-marker buoys
4) the inboard depth finder alarm went off saying we were in just a few feet if water! And we were on an outgoing tide – in the middle of the channel in what had been over 30feet of water! The was a sudden risk of being grounded. A very dangerous situation in a low slung speedboat with a rough sea.
5) my iPhone 3.0 had recently had the dreaded IOS4 upgrade and was playing up badly, the battery would only last a few minutes so for it to work it had to be linked to my laptop (yes, I know, serious sad case taking my laptop with me but sometimes you just can’t be offline and being as we were having server issues with our main site, I took it, thank goodness I did or we would have been screwed.
6) a fuel gauge that suddenly read 50% less than we had expected due to the rough seas using up all the power.
So with sea state worsening, a massive unexpected sandbar beneath us and no idea where we were. Plus an outgoing tide which meant we could be stranded (we had paper charts onboard which suggested the sandbar is dry at low tide) plus running low on fuel; we were in somewhat of a panic. We decided to divert to Cardiff rather than try to make Watchet Harbour as we did not fancy calling the RNLI.
The only way we could safely navigate our way clear of any charted sandbanks and to Cardiff on the most direct route to save fuel (Cardiff was some 5 miles away and even getting there with the fuel we had was uncertain) was to get the Boatie app going.
So there I was, in a pitching boat, head in the fordeck trying to plot a navigable route using just my app and also looking at where GoogleEarth said we were. It turned out that Google earth was not as accurate at sea as it is on land, by quite some margin, but the accuracy of Boatie was spot on and it allowed us to get close enough to the mouth of Cardiff harbour to actually see it through the sea mist and rain and find the deep channel into the harbour (The entrance to Cardiff is strewn with dodgy sandbanks).
All in all, I was very thankful of the Boatie app. now I just need to find a way of rolling back the iphone to the pre-IOS4 installation…
