The Anchor Club

Welcome

The Anchor Club app monitors your boat location using GPS satellites signals and the GPS sensor in your phone. GPS accuracy varies depending how many satellites there are and whether your phone has a clear view of the sky.

The developers have designed the app to request an accuracy of about 4m to 5m. Increasing accuracy increases battery utilisation. When anchoring 5m provides adequate accuracy while minimising battery drain. You can see actual accuracy by the size of the blue bubble or in the bottom right corner of the map.

Important

!! The app must remain in foreground on the boat phone to continue to receive regular GPS updates. The app will continue to run in background for 5 to 10 minutes or maybe longer depending on your device, but iOS will at some point terminate location updates and you will not receive important critical alarms.

We have created a 'screen saver' mode so that your device is on in foreground getting continuous updates. Our experience with many other apps is that updates stop or freeze. Choose the lock icon to enable the screen saver.

!! The app must also be added to sleep mode on remote devices, otherwise you won't be alerted when an alarm is sent. It's not great to wake up at 8am to find yourself half way across teh bay!!

Alarm types

You choose to set the location of the anchor and a radial perimeter for the anchor alarm. If your phone moves outside of the perimeter you will receive an alarm.

The app will also monitor for anchor drag within the perimeter. After a ten minute stablisation period after dropping the anchor, the app will monitor to see if your distance from the anchor substantially increases, if it does you will receive an alarm.

The app can monitor how close you are to other boats using Anchor Club. So if you expect bad weather, ask your neighbours to install Anchor Club, they will see your location, and you can see theirs. If your boat comes to close to theirs, you will receive an alarm.

The app also monitors wind and swell forecast. If the forecast wind or wind gusts exceed 20kts, you will receive an alarm.

The app also monitors motion, that's how rolly you are. When the phone is on a flat surface the device calculates the amount of roll, the time between waves, and the height of waves. If you are on the boat you'll feel the motion, but if you are away from the boat, you can see how rolly it is, or you can see how rolly other boats are.

The app also monitors air pressure. If the pressure drops by a significant amount within an hour, you will receive an alarm.

If you are not on your boat, you can link additional devices as crew or as captain (admin) to monitor the boat location, motion, and air pressure remotely. Your remote device will receive the above alerts, and alerts if the GPS location is delayed or the boat device battery is low.

Anchoring

Unlike other apps of this kind we offer you the option to set the anchor without activating the alarms. In our experience while crusing this is useful when you first set the anchor, or when you decide to leave the boat with your phone for a short while. There's no need to lift the anchor on the app.

We also thought it would be useful to see you boat trace before you drop the anchor, that way you can see where you have been and you have a better chance to set the right location on the app.

Profile

Choose a name for yourself or your device, at least 3 characters

The app can work in metric or imperial units

Choose a language, spanish, french, german or english

You can either have the position of Captain (admin) or crew. And a role of on boat or remote. There must be at least one Captain and one boat phone. You can change add crew in the 'link device' settings and change role and positions

Boat

Choose a name for your boat, the flag, type and catagory. These details are more for fun and sharing with others. They have no impact on how the app functions

Share

You can shre the app with friends and neighbours using a QR code, or by sending a message via email, sms or whatsapp. The QR code is the easiest. There are (or will be) two versions of the app, iOS and Android (to come in 2025).

Link

You can invite a second or thrid device to remotely monitor your boat. Or chose one of these to be the boat device. It's practical to leave one device on the boat while you go ashore to monitor the alarms to give you peace of mind, or alert you of an issue.

You can see a list of other crew members and captains. Captains can change the role and permissions of crew. Crew can leave at any time and captains can remove crew.

Rollyness

While you anchor, your phone monitors motion and calculates rollyness: flat, calm, mild, rolly, rough and crazy. This information is shared to remote devices but we also collect this against the current weather conditions so that you and other club members can see how rolly it is now, or is likely to be. These areas are depicted by hexagons on the map and are colour coded based on how rolly they are.

History

Unlike other apps, we don't ask you for a formal review, other than a quick 0-5 rating, but we do place an historic anchor mark on the map each time someone anchors for more than an hour. In this way you can see exactly where other club members have anchored, what type of boat they had, how much chain they used, and what rating they gave their overall experience.

Sounds

There are two types of alarms: primary and secondary. Primary alarms are for anchor perimeter, drag and GPS loss. Secondary alarms are for battery, wind and pressure.

Premium

The app allows you to see information about boats nearby. If you want to see information about boats or previous anchors further away you can choose a small monthly subscription to help the developers to maintain the cost of this service.

Privacy and Data

The boat phone sends location, pressure and motion data to the Anchor Club server. This allows remote devices to monitor the boat and receive alarms. No personal data is collected other than your chosen name. You can stop sharing location updates by switching location off in settings -> privacy & security, choose 'Never'.

If you do not wish to appar in searches or on the map, or have your historic anchorages shared with others, you can select to go under the radar in boat settings

To see more terms, conditions and privacy more.

Feedback & Support

We would love to hear feedback, good and bad. So please get in touch Contact Us.