A new website aims to use crowd-sourcing to create a bank of free, up to date information about anchorages and marine facilities worldwide.
Goodanchorage.com intends to make life easier for captains of superyachts and all vessels by allowing them to share information on ports, anchorages, marinas, fuel quays, yards, repair facilities and more. The site hopes to offer 50,000 anchorages worldwide by 2018.
Mariners will be asked to include exact anchorage coordinates including depth, charts, images, visual aids and waypoints. These will be integrated with 72-hour weather forecasts, the latest local news, customs and immigration procedures, and new features added weekly for provisioning, fuel, boat parts, restaurants, events and cultural activities. Anchorage sites are ‘quality controlled’ by Goodanchorage.com representatives in each maritime community.
The service is free and Goodanchorage.com is also encouraging users connected to a marine business, for instance a marina, to use that as their user name, effectively creating a free advert at each anchorage about which they share information. It makes sense for a marina, agent or marine company to share anchorages that surround or are en route to their business, suggests Goodancorage.com
‘Access to quality, dependable data for all maritime needs will increase the opportunities for current captains and less experienced mariners to explore our planet,’ says Captain Dietmar Petutschnig, highlighting the need for reliable information on new cruising grounds in Asia, former Eastern Bloc countries, Latin America and the South Pacific.
‘Captains on all types of vessels spend up to 40 percent of their time researching and planning, using cruising guides that can be both obsolete and costly, while also seeking a multitude of resources for current news, anchorages, customs and immigration procedures, and other services before entering the waters of an unfamiliar country,’ says the team behind the venture.