What's new in AnchorQueen 2.4.3

A release about the app telling you the truth about where you are. The anchor

screen opens on your boat rather than on the whole world, the buoys and beacons

you navigate by stop disappearing from the chart, and Jules no longer invents a

position when she does not have one.

A route Jules plans is a route you can see

Show on Chart on one of Jules's route cards now does what it says in every

chart mode. In Voyage mode it used to fly the chart to a passage that was never

drawn there — the chart shows recorded passages in that mode, and a route Jules

had just planned was neither recorded nor selected — so the camera arrived at an

empty stretch of water. The button now selects the route as well as framing it,

and entering Voyage no longer replaces a route you deliberately opened with the

last passage you recorded.

The framing also knows about the chat itself. With Jules open as a panel over

the chart, the route was being centred in the middle of the map — which is

behind the panel — so the better the framing, the more reliably you could not

see it. Routes are now framed in the part of the chart the panel leaves

visible, and the same is true when Jules moves the chart herself to show you a

harbour or an anchorage.

Smaller, in the same corner: the Show on Chart button was the one label on

that card that had never been translated, and now reads in your own language.

Its neighbour is now labelled Start Navigation rather than just Start —

it was sharing a translation with the button that starts recording a passage,

which is a different thing entirely. The whole card also follows your text-size

setting now, instead of staying small however large you have set the rest of

the app.

One AIS connection for the whole fleet

Live ship traffic no longer has to arrive over a connection your iPhone opens

itself. AnchorQueen can now hold one connection to aisstream.io and share

it with every boat, instead of every copy of the app opening its own on the

same built-in key — which is what made the key run out of capacity in the first

place.

You don't choose it and you don't manage it. The app picks the connection

each session and switches back on its own if the shared one isn't available.

Live traffic keeps working either way; nothing to configure, nothing to fix.

The shared connection needs you to be signed in. Signed out, AnchorQueen

uses a direct connection exactly as before.

You can see which one you're on. The AIS row in Chart Layers carries a

badge — Shared connection or Direct connection — and the new

Settings → Chart → AIS Traffic section explains what each one means. When

there is something worth doing about it (the shared key is full, or signing

in would get you the shared connection) it says so plainly; otherwise it

stays out of your way.

Ships don't pop in and vanish. Contacts that have stopped updating leave

the chart instead of sitting there looking live, and switching between

connections no longer empties the chart while the new one warms up.

See AIS Traffic.

The chart wakes up again after a base-map change

Switching the base map — day to night, S-52 to satellite, any chart theme —

left the chart frozen in place. Not visibly: the map still drew, still panned,

still zoomed. But everything the chart derives from where you are looking

stopped at the moment you launched the app.

You could see it in three places. The latitude and longitude grid stayed as a

small patch drawn for the zoom you started at, instead of redrawing for the

view in front of you. The region panels — Buoys, Beacons, Harbours, Lights —

went empty and their rail buttons disappeared, because the app was still

filtering for a viewport you had long since sailed away from. And routes and

passages vanished from the chart entirely.

The position panel gave it away: the zoom readout, the crosshair coordinates,

the place name and the bearing/distance to the crosshair were all still

reporting your last session's view. Your own GPS position was correct

throughout — everything measured against it was not.

The chart now tracks the camera again. As a side effect, the map also

remembers where you left it: until now every launch reopened at the same

stored position no matter where you had been.

See Chart — what you see.

Buoys, beacons and harbours stop vanishing from the chart

The region panels — Buoys, Beacons, Lights, Harbours — and the customs,

dive-site and marina overlays could all go empty at once, then fill again a

minute later, with a working connection throughout. Nothing on screen said

anything had failed; the sea simply looked emptier than it is.

The app reads these marks from OpenStreetMap, and falls back through a list of

public servers when the busiest one is slow. One of those servers turned out to

carry only Swiss data. Asked about the Aegean — or anywhere else at sea — it

answered promptly, successfully, and with nothing in it. The app had no way to

tell that apart from a genuinely empty stretch of water, so it believed the

answer, stopped asking the other servers, and remembered the emptiness for the

next few minutes.

The Swiss-only server is gone, replaced by one that carries the whole

world, so a fallback now returns the marks that are actually there.

An empty answer is no longer trusted for long. When a stretch of chart

comes back with nothing on it, the app re-checks within seconds instead of

holding that emptiness for minutes — so a bad moment on the network costs

you a pan, not a passage. This now covers marina and anchorage outlines and

the customs overlay too, not just buoys and beacons.

A second server turned out to be a duplicate. Two entries on the

fallback list were the same machine under different names, so when it was

having a bad day the app tried it twice and called that a fallback. It is

now three genuinely independent servers, in three countries.

A busy server is given time to answer. These are volunteer-run, and

under load one can take twenty seconds rather than refuse outright. The app

used to give up after six and write that server off — precisely when it was

the only one left. It now waits as long as the server is allowed to take.

Marks read from your installed chart packs were never affected; this only

concerns the live OpenStreetMap overlay.

See Chart — what you see.

The chart stops re-asking for the same sea

Companion to the fix above, and the reason it kept happening. Every time the

chart settled after a pan, the app re-fetched everything it draws from the

internet — buoys and beacons, dive sites, customs offices, marina outlines,

marine life, articles, fishing activity. The test for "has the view moved

enough to be worth re-asking?" was a fixed distance of about 165 metres, and it

was the same 165 metres whether you were berthing or looking at half the

Aegean.

Zoomed out, that is nothing. Nudging the chart 165 metres across a 120-kilometre

view changes about a tenth of a percent of what you can see, and the app went

and asked for all of it again. Four minutes of ordinary panning was enough to

ask twenty times over — which is what got the public map servers to start

turning us away, which is what left the chart looking empty.

The threshold now scales with the view. The chart re-asks when you have

moved about a sixth of the screen, so it stays as responsive as before when

you are close in and stops thrashing when you are looking at open sea.

A stalled fetch is retried. The "already covered" marker is set before

the data arrives, so a fetch that failed used to leave that patch of sea

marked done. It now expires, and the next time the chart settles it tries

again.

Customs offices wait for your finger to lift, like every other overlay,

instead of firing mid-pan.

You should see this as fewer "servers unreachable" notices, not as slower

updates.

See Chart — what you see.

Route mode opens a list, not somebody else's route

Tapping Route used to adopt your most recent plan and drop you straight

into editing it. You arrived already changing a route you had not chosen — and

because a route under edit takes the chart to itself, every other route

disappeared at the same moment.

Route mode now lands where it always said it would: on your Saved Routes,

with nothing selected. Selecting is something you do — tap a row, or long-press

the chart to drop A. A plan you were part-way through drawing is still waiting

for you; only an empty draft is reset.

The chart follows the same idea. In Route mode it shows your plans, and

recorded passages step aside rather than burying the canvas you are drawing on.

Passages live in Voyage, which is scoped to them, and

the Passages filter in the panel still puts one on the chart when you ask.

The list opens on Routes for the same reason.

See Chart — Route.

Safe Anchor opens on your chart, not on the whole world

Tapping Safe Anchor could drop you onto a chart zoomed all the way out —

the entire globe, your anchorage a pixel somewhere on it — even though the

chart tab you had just left was framed on your harbour. You had to find your

way back every time.

Safe Anchor was quietly building a second copy of the chart each time you

opened the tab, from scratch, while the one you had been using sat hidden

behind it. A brand-new chart has to be told where to look before it has been

given a size on screen, and when it had been opened before — so its map style

came from memory rather than the network — that instruction arrived too early

to take. The new copy then settled on its own default view: the world.

There is one chart now, shared by every tab that shows one. Safe Anchor's

anchor watch, the chart tab, Capt's Notebook and Merconi all draw on the same

map, so switching between them is instant and there is no reload in between.

The chart tab holds its own view: pan it inside Capt's Notebook or Merconi and

the chart tab is already there when you go back. (Opening the anchor watch

is the deliberate exception — it re-centres on your boat every time. See

[below](#anchor-watch-entry).)

Switching to Safe Anchor is no longer a reload. The old copy re-read the

map style, rebuilt every overlay and started a second tile cache each time

you opened the tab. None of that happens any more, which is one less thing

competing for memory and battery while a watch is running.

Radar still gets the screen to itself. The chart is put away rather than

drawn underneath the radar scope, where nothing could see it anyway.

Ask Jules about the chart after visiting Safe Anchor. Her map

questions — what is on screen, where you are looking, a snapshot of the

chart — were answered from the copy that had just been thrown away, so they

came back empty. She reads the live chart again.

Turning the phone keeps your view too. On a device wide enough to show

the side panel in landscape, rotating in or out of it was rebuilding the

chart the same way — same cause, same result. Rotate as often as you like;

position, zoom, tilt and heading stay exactly where they were.

See Safe Anchor — Anchor Watch.

Safe Anchor opens on your boat, with the controls under your thumb

Two things about opening the anchor watch, both of which used to make you work

before you could do anything.

It goes to your boat every time, not just the first time. Opening Safe

Anchor now flies straight to you and zooms in close — tight enough to see the

swing circle and the distance rings around the boat. Previously only the first

visit of a session did this; every visit after it left you wherever the

chart had last been pointed, which on a long passage could be

hours away. If the anchor is already down, the view is framed on the swing

circle instead, so the whole watch is on screen at once.

The chart tab is unaffected. It still keeps whatever you were last

looking at. Only opening the anchor watch re-centres.

The command buttons sit at the bottom of the screen. Drop Anchor /

Direct It and the Anchor Watch / Radar pills were floating in the

middle of the chart, over the water you were trying to read, and needed a

reach up the screen. They now sit along the bottom edge, in the same place as

the chart tab's own bar — so your thumb finds them without

looking, and the chart above them is clear.

See Safe Anchor — Anchor Watch.

Jules knows what she knows

Every time you write to Jules, the app hands her a snapshot of

your situation — where you are, what your boat is, what the chart is showing.

Parts of that snapshot could be wrong in ways she had no way to notice, and a

confident wrong answer is worse than an honest "I don't know".

She no longer invents a position. Before the first GPS fix arrives — or

if location services are off, or the fix is stale — the app used to hand

her the coordinates 0°N 0°E, a point in the Atlantic off West Africa,

and mark them as pinpoint-accurate. She then answered "where am I?" with

the North Atlantic and listed the "nearest" marinas: a river port in

Germany, a lake marina, all at 0.0 NM. She is now told plainly that

there is no fix, and asks you instead of guessing. The place name, the

water you are in, and the harbour list are simply left out until there is a

real position.

One position per answer. A fix arriving in the middle of that snapshot

could leave the sea area describing one place and the place name and

harbour list describing another — in the same reply.

She knows your boat's draft. Draft, beam, length overall, your safety

margin and air draft now reach her from your

Vessel Profile, so depth, anchorage and berth

answers are about your boat. Draft had never been included at all.

Your boat's length now reaches the app that plans your routes. If you

filled in your boat card but never opened the Vessel Profile screen, the

app was planning, depth-checking and advising a stock boat for your

vessel type — a real 64-footer was being treated as a 35 ft yacht, half the

length and a metre less draft. Your card's length is now used to set up the

profile the first time, and the starting draft and beam are taken from a

boat of that size rather than a boat of that type. Anything you have

edited yourself is never touched.

Draft is still yours to confirm. Your length is on the boat card;

your draft isn't, and it varies by more than a metre between two boats of

the same length. So the app treats the starting draft as an estimate and

Jules says so — she will ask for your real figure before answering a depth

or anchoring question that turns on it. Setting it once, under

Vessel Profile, is the most useful minute

you can spend.

Your length is no longer read as metres. The length on your boat card

is entered in feet, and it was being passed to Jules as metres — a 61 ft

yacht arrived as a 61 m ship, and every swing-room and clearance answer was

scaled to a boat three times your size.

She sees the plan you actually have. Jules reads the same subscription

the rest of the app gates on, so she stops offering you what you already

own — or holding back what you have paid for.

Your alarm radius is visible again, and one tap from adjusting

The ring the drag alarm actually fires on was a 1.5 pt dashed hairline. Over

pale sand, bright depth shading or satellite imagery it simply wasn't there.

The rings are drawn to be read. The green swing ring is now a solid,

dark-haloed line and the amber warning ring a bolder dash, so both stay

legible on any base map — day or night, chart or imagery.

The radius rides in the GPS HUD. While a watch is armed, the

HUD carries a tinted anchor chip on its

minimized rail — / m, green through amber to red — on

every chart tab, not just Safe Anchor. Open the HUD and it becomes a full

row with the state word and a room-left bar, with the alarm boundary ticked

on it.

Tap it to re-tune. Either form opens the leading-edge alarm-distance

slider — the same one Safe Anchor's Alarm On chip opens — so "how much

room do I have?" and "give me more" are one tap apart from anywhere on the

chart.

Re-anchoring at a past spot no longer trips the alarm

Tapping one of your grey past-anchorage markers opens its Previous

Anchorage card, and Auto-Set Anchor Here re-arms the watch on that drop

point. It used to re-arm with the recorded radius exactly as it stood.

That is almost never right: you tap last season's pin from wherever the boat is

lying now, tens of metres off, so the watch armed with your boat already

outside its own circle and the siren sounded on the next fix.

The safe zone now opens to include where you are — the larger of the

radius you recorded and your present distance from that drop point, plus an

allowance for GPS accuracy.

It tells you what it did. A short confirmation names the radius the watch

resumed at, and says so explicitly when it had to widen it.

Older stays benefit most. Anchorages recorded before the app kept your

scope and depth fall back to safe defaults, and this widening is what makes

their zone fit your boat's actual position.

See SafeAnchor — Re-anchoring at a past spot.

The anchor icons are back, everywhere they were missing

Across the app, a number of places that should have shown a small anchor were

showing nothing at all — an empty gap where the icon belongs. The sidebar's

Anchor Watch heading and its Drop Anchor row were the most visible, but

the same blank turned up on saved-anchorage cards, the long-press chart menu,

the command palette, route-plan anchorage stats and the fleet HUD.

Every one of those now draws the anchor. Nothing else moved: the labels,

colours, sizes and layout are unchanged — the glyph simply appears where

there used to be a hole.

It scales with your text size like the icons beside it, except on the two

readouts with a fixed layout budget (the fleet HUD tile and the chart's

long-press fan), which stay pinned so their geometry holds.

Some other icons elsewhere in the app are still missing for the same underlying

reason and are being worked through separately.

The vessel carousel sits under the HUD again

With boats connected, the row of vessel chips is meant to dock just below the

GPS HUD card. It was being positioned against the height of the whole chart

instead of the card's, which pushed it off the bottom of the screen. It now

measures the card, so the chips sit where they belong.

Fly your own wake

A recorded passage has always been a line on the chart. Now it can also be a

flight. Open any passage's detail page and there is a second option beside

Replay: Replay in 3D.

It opens full screen and takes off. The camera rides astern and above the boat,

the coast and the islands rise into real relief around you, and your track

paints itself ahead in the same speed colours the chart uses — blue where you

were drifting, orange where you were flying — with a marker at every turn you

made. Down the left edge a speed scale carries a live marker at whatever you

were doing at that instant. The scrubber along the bottom is not just a

position; it is the whole passage's speed profile in one strip. Run it at 10×,

60× or 240×.

Two things to be clear about:

It is a picture, not a chart. The terrain is land elevation and the water

is not surveyed depth. Nothing in the 3D view is for navigation — that is

what the chart is for.

It needs a connection, like the live weather map.

Replay in 3D is included with Pro and Max. On a Free plan it plays a short

preview so you can see what your own passages look like, then offers the

upgrade. If you subscribe from there, it picks up exactly where the preview

stopped.

What changed now finds you, once

The release notes you are reading have shipped inside the app for a while, but

nothing ever pointed you at them — you had to go looking through

Settings → Help.

The first time you open AnchorQueen after an update, this page opens

itself. Once. Close it and it stays closed until the next update.

A brand-new install does not get a changelog — there is nothing yet to

have missed.

It never covers an armed anchor watch. If you update while riding to your

anchor, the notes wait until a launch when the watch is off. The

daily voyage report keeps priority too.

You can always find them again from the sidebar's User Manual entry

or Settings → Help, including the notes for earlier

versions.

The Route Panel reads like an instrument, not a caption

The small grey line under a route's name — distance, time, minimum depth —

has grown into a proper three-cell instrument cluster, the first piece of the

new Helm panel design.

Under-keel clearance is the hero number. The panel now answers the

question the minimum-depth figure only hinted at: *how much water will be

under the boat at the shallowest point of this route?* It takes the charted

least depth along the route, adds the predicted tide at the time you will

actually be there, and subtracts your vessel's draft (from the Vessel

profile). Green means clearance at or above your safety margin, amber means

less than the margin, red means the number has gone to zero or below.

ETA and distance stand beside it — the arrival wall-clock time and the

route's total distance while you plan, switching to the distance still to go

while you navigate. While a route is still solving, the cluster shows the

solve progress and the distance routed so far.

A route that needed compromises says so, permanently. When the planner

had to relax its rules to find a way through — shallow-water routing, a

best-effort pass, or crossing a traffic separation scheme — the cluster

carries a small amber flag that stays after planning finishes, instead of a

notice that vanished with the progress text.

One button starts guidance. The green NAV pill that used to sit in

the panel header is gone; the Navigate button in the action row is the

single place guidance starts and stops.

One button that always knows the next step

The Route Panel's row of small action pills is gone. In its place sit two

things that work as a pair, continuing the panel's new Helm design.

A single wide button that morphs with the moment. While the planner

works it reads Solving · N % and waits. A freshly solved route without

a departure time shows Set Departure — tap it and the panel takes you

straight to the departure picker, because the forecast and the tide

correction load from that time. With a departure set it becomes

Navigate; while guidance runs it turns red and reads Stop

Guidance. It is the only start/stop control on the panel — no more

hunting between a header pill and an action row that both did the same

thing.

A coach line above it says why. One pulsing sentence narrates the same

moment in words — which leg is routing, what to set next, what Navigate

will do — and while you are under way it becomes an amber steering

readout: course to steer (with an arrow for which side of the track you

are on), cross-track error, the next waypoint with its distance, and when

you will reach it. The pulse goes still if you have Reduce Motion on.

Auto-route lives in the ⋯ menu now, at the top, next to Details,

Export PDF and Delete Route.

Your route reads like a voyage plan

The Route Panel's list of waypoint slots has become a voyage timeline —

the third piece of the Helm redesign.

Every stop is a pin on a rail. A magenta line runs down the left of

the list; the stops you placed sit on it as filled, lettered pins (A, B,

C…). Each row shows the stop's name, the time you will arrive there

(worked out from your departure time and planned speed — an em dash until

you set a departure), and a small course · distance line for the leg

that brings you to it.

The router's own points stay out of the way. The dozens of small

points auto-routing adds between your stops fold into a single "+N leg

points" row. Tap it to see them — numbered hollow pins with their own

course, distance and arrival time — and tap again to fold them away.

The shallowest spot is flagged where it happens. The row for the leg

that crosses the route's least depth carries a small amber depth flag, so

you can see at a glance which part of the passage the headline

clearance number comes from.

Rows still act like the old slots. Tap a row to fly the chart to that

point — while navigating, tapping a later stop retargets guidance to it —

and press-and-hold for replace-by-search, use-vessel-position, focus, or

remove. The Free-form / Dock to Dock switch now sits in the

timeline's header; Dock to Dock itself is unchanged.

The timeline shows at the panel's full height (and always in

landscape), and long passages scroll inside the list instead of

stretching the panel.

One tap to add waypoints, anchors and harbours

The new ⊕ ring button beside the route action button makes growing a route

fast from the panel without hunting through search first — phase four of the

Helm redesign.

Tap ⊕ to fan out three quick actions. An overlay veil softens the panel

and three rings open around the button:

Waypoint — opens destination search focused on the next slot.

Anchor — drops an anchorage marker into the next slot (or after your

latest stop, and at chart centre if starting fresh).

Dock — automatically fills the slot with the nearest harbour from the

maritime index.

A brief toast confirms where the point landed. A notification at the top

of the panel tells you which stop was filled and suggests any next step (such

as dragging to adjust).

The ⊕ rotates to × to make dismissal obvious, or tap anywhere on the veil

to close. The fan animation respects your Reduce Motion setting.

Depth profile focused on shallow water safety

The Route Panel's depth graph has been re-engineered for coastal navigation

clarity — phase five of the Helm redesign.

A vertical band that protects coastal shallows. The graph Y-axis clamps

strictly to 0–30 m (or 3× your safety depth for deep-draft vessels) with an

off-scale indicator for deep ocean trenches. A 500-metre abyss no longer

squishes a critical 3-metre passage into an unreadable hairline.

Red dashed safety clearance line. A prominent dashed red line marks your

vessel's configured minimum safety depth across the entire passage.

Tide-corrected water depths. The depth curve reflects predicted water level

at the exact estimated time of arrival for each segment of the route, computed

automatically in the background.

Distance axis. 10-nautical-mile tick marks run along the base of the graph

with total distance marked on the right.

Always-on interactive scrub readout. Drag your finger across the graph at

any time to inspect depth, distance along the route, and predicted arrival time

in a floating badge above the cursor.

Find the route you mean in one tap

The Saved Routes list opens with two new quick-select chips: Latest and

Longest. One tap re-sorts your routes newest-first or biggest-passage

first — and, unlike the list's normal viewport scope, a quick chip searches

your whole library, whatever corner of the chart you are looking at. The

header says so ("12 across all charts"), and tapping the chip again returns

to browsing what's in view. They sit beside the existing All / Routes /

Passages filter and remember your choice.

Route rows got the Helm treatment too: the identity dot is the same magenta

as the route line on the chart, and each planned route now reads its

distance in your chosen units beside its waypoint count — recorded

passages show their distance and date without the old raw point count.

Australia and Mexico, and Taiwan's rocks come back

Seven chart regions arrived in the Store, and they are

already there — you do not need this update to download them, only to see them

filed under the right heading.

Australia ships as four cruising grounds rather than one enormous download:

East & Great Barrier Reef, South & Tasmania, West, and North.

The split follows where people actually sail, and the seams overlap on purpose

at Bass Strait, Torres Strait and the Kimberley corner so a passage never falls

between two packs.

Mexico ships as three: the Sea of Cortez with Baja, the Pacific coast

from Cabo San Lucas down to Huatulco, and the Gulf & Caribbean side with

Yucatán and Cozumel.

What is behind them matters more than the count:

Australian depths come from Australia's own survey record. The national

bathymetry compilation is built from about 1,500 real surveys — multibeam,

single-beam, airborne LiDAR — rather than a model of what the seabed probably

looks like. In the Torres Strait the finer 30 m survey grid is folded in on

top, because that is where the Great North East Channel runs and where a

charted depth actually decides your route.

Lights now tell you what they do. Lighted marks carry their character,

nominal range and focal height — Fl.W. period 10s, not just a dot. That is

roughly three to seven times as many lights as before on these coasts.

Reefs and rocks on the Queensland coast are charted as areas, from the

reef authority's own mapping: 360 rocks and 3,862 reef platforms in the East

pack alone. Route planning treats them as ground to avoid, not scenery.

Taiwan: a layer that was switched off

If you have the Taiwan pack installed, update it — the Store will offer it.

Since it first shipped in June, the pack has carried 57 charted dangers — 40

rocks, 14 wrecks, 3 obstructions — that the app never drew. The data was in the

download; a missing line in the package's own index meant the app looked for it

under the wrong name and quietly found nothing. Route planning could not see

them either.

They are visible now, and the router avoids them. The same update adds 284

lighted marks with their characters, and removes soundings that had been

printed slightly inland.

We would rather tell you plainly than let it sit. If you sailed Taiwanese waters

on this pack, the depths and the coastline were right; the rocks and wrecks were

missing from the picture.

Fly over any seamark in 3D

Every seamark's info card now carries a 3D Terrain Flyover button. Tap it

and the chart gives way to a cinematic view of that light, buoy or anchorage on

real elevation terrain — the camera falls from a survey view down into a slow

circle around the mark, the way a film establishes a location.

The camera is yours the moment you touch it: drag to steer the circle, pinch to

move closer, and the slow orbit picks itself back up a few seconds after you

let go. Or switch to the free camera and fly the coast however you like. The

passage replay's base-map picker is on board too, satellite imagery included.

Sponsored banners at the top of detail cards

Sponsored ad banners on detail sheets (harbours, customs offices, seamarks, vessels, marine life, captain's marks, route plans, and articles) now sit prominently at the top of the sheet for immediate visibility. A lock symbol and 5-second countdown timer hold the sheet until the ad finishes loading, instantly unlocking interactive drag-to-close upon ad load completion or when the 5-second safety timer elapses.