What We Built

WhereIsOurBoat started as a simple idea: one link that always shows where our boat is, so family and friends can stop asking and just look. It has grown into two things we now rely on every day — live position tracking and an anchor alarm — and both have earned their keep. Since leaving the Dominican Republic, the system has tracked us through Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and now the British Virgin Islands without missing a beat.

The Anchor Alarm You Can Set From Shore

This is the feature we did not expect to love as much as we do.

Here is the scenario every cruiser knows. You drop the hook, get settled, and head ashore for dinner. Halfway through the meal a gust rolls through and you remember you never set the anchor alarm. Now you are sitting at a bar a half mile away, watching the palm trees bend, wondering if your home is still where you left it.

Our anchor alarm fixes exactly that. We can set it, monitor it, and get alerts from anywhere — including from a phone on shore. Honestly, we almost never remember to set it while we are still aboard. We set it from the dinghy dock, or from the dinner table, the moment the worry kicks in. It just works. It is brilliant.

Why It Works From Anywhere

The trick is where the GPS comes from. Every anchor alarm app we have ever used runs on your phone’s GPS, which means it only works while you are aboard with the app awake and open. Walk away with the phone in your pocket and the watch walks off with you.

Ours uses the boat’s own GPS instead — the position coming straight off the boat’s NMEA 2000 network — and reports it online. The anchor watch is tied to the boat, not to your phone. So it keeps running whether you are in the cockpit or two rum punches deep at a beach bar, and it can reach you wherever you are. Set it from shore, monitor it from shore, get the alert on shore. The boat is watching itself.

Tracking That Has Not Missed a Beat

The other half is the part that started it all: one clean, always-current page that shows where the boat is. No app for anyone to install, no commercial vessel-traffic site to decipher — just a link you can text to your mom. It shows our current position and recent track, and it has quietly logged the entire run from the Dominican Republic through the BVI.

For the people back home, the answer to “where are you?” is now a link. For us, it is knowing that someone can always see where we are.

How It Connects

Today the system reads the boat’s data through a direct NMEA 2000-to-WiFi connection. If you already run a NMEA 2000 network with a WiFi gateway — and plenty of boats do — you can be up and tracking with the exact setup we use right now. It has run flawlessly for us across an entire Caribbean season.

What Is Coming

We are not stopping there. The next piece is a dedicated, plug-and-play device: connect it to your NMEA 2000 network, get it online, and the tracking and anchor alarm just work — no gateway to configure, nothing to rig. It is in testing now, and it will make the whole thing effortless for any boat that wants it.

And that is just the start. There is more coming.

Follow Along

The tracking and the anchor alarm are real, we use them every single day, and they have proven themselves across a few hundred miles of open water. If you want to follow our boat — or be among the first to get the dedicated device when it ships — you can find us at whereisourboat.com.