Voyage Buddy — Real-time Go/No-go boating decisions

Voyage Buddy is a real-time boating decision engine for safer passage planning. Wind, waves, tides, fuel range, daylight, and crew readiness are synthesized into a single Go, Caution, or No-go answer before you leave the dock, and re-evaluated continuously while you are underway. Built and maintained by Jim Bentz, a U.S. Navy veteran and licensed captain, Voyage Buddy is designed for recreational and small commercial boaters on the U.S. coast and the Great Lakes.

What Voyage Buddy does

Most boating apps show you a chart, a wind arrow, and a tide curve, and leave you to do the math under pressure. Voyage Buddy goes a step further: it pulls live data from NOAA marine forecasts, NDBC buoy observations, NOAA tide and current stations, AIS vessel traffic, and maritime routing servers, and then matches that data against your specific vessel — hull type, real-world burn rate, cruise speed, draft, and crew load — to produce one clear recommendation for the trip you are actually planning. The output is always a single answer with the reasons spelled out: which thresholds passed, which are marginal, and which are unsafe right now.

How the decision engine works

The decision engine runs in four steps every time you check a trip. First, it pulls authoritative marine data for your waypoints — forecasts, buoys, tides, currents, AIS traffic, and routing. Second, it matches that data to your vessel's performance profile rather than a one-size-fits-all limit. Third, it weighs wind, sea state, tide windows, daylight, fuel reserve, and known hazards against captain-tunable thresholds. Fourth, it delivers a clear Go, Caution, or No-go call with every contributing factor visible, so you can override with full context if you choose. Voyage Buddy is a planning aid, not a replacement for official charts, NOAA forecasts, or VHF Channel 16. The captain remains in command of every decision.

Underway monitoring and live tracking

The forecast you left with is not always the forecast you sail in. Voyage Buddy watches wind shifts, building seas, tide swings, and incoming weather alerts the entire time you are out, and pushes a notification the moment something matters for your vessel. You can share a live tracking link with family or crew ashore — they see your position and ETA in a read-only viewer with a tokenized link, no account required on their end. Live tracking is bandwidth-aware, so it works on patchy cellular, on satellite, and on Starlink Maritime without burning through your data budget.

Vessel intelligence and fleet management

Voyage Buddy treats every vessel as its own profile. You can record real-world fuel burn at different RPMs, cruise and maximum speeds, draft, beam, and crew capacity. That profile feeds every safety threshold, every fuel-range estimate, and every ETA. Charter operators and small fleets can manage multiple vessels under one account, assign crew, and track maintenance schedules with recurring and engine-hour triggers so service is never overdue. Fuel logs feed back into the burn-rate profile so the numbers stay honest over time.

Marine data sources

Voyage Buddy is built on authoritative public marine data. We pull from NOAA marine forecasts and NWS gridded products, NDBC offshore and nearshore buoys for sea state and wind observations, NOAA tide and current stations for tide windows and slack-water timing, Open-Meteo as a forecast model when coastal NWS coverage is sparse, AISStream.io for live AIS vessel traffic, and Searoutes for ocean-aware routing. Coverage and refresh cadence vary by source; if a feed is unavailable for your region, the app falls back to a clearly labeled forecast model so you always know what is observed and what is modeled.

Connectivity for offshore and Starlink Maritime

Voyage Buddy is engineered for the real connectivity boaters actually use. The app is bandwidth-aware: on a strong LTE connection it streams full updates, on a weak satellite link it shrinks to essentials, and offline it queues writes and syncs the moment a usable connection returns. A live link-strength meter shows what tier of service you currently have, and the Starlink Maritime coverage card highlights restricted-use zones for users on satellite. NMEA 0183, NMEA 2000, and SignalK inputs are supported on the local boat network so onboard instruments feed straight into the decision engine without going through the public internet.

Privacy and security

Voyage Buddy does not sell or share user data. Account login uses passkey-grade authentication; live-share links use high-entropy tokens and can be revoked at any time. Customs documents, vessel photos, crew rosters, and logbooks are stored privately and served only to the user who owns them or to crew members they have explicitly invited. The product is delivered exclusively over HTTPS and follows a published threat model with quarterly review.

Who Voyage Buddy is for

Voyage Buddy is built for weekend captains, offshore anglers, cruisers planning multi-day passages, charter operators, and small marina fleets who want a disciplined pre-departure check, live underway monitoring, and a single place to keep vessel performance, fuel logs, and maintenance records. Plans start free with one vessel and three saved trips. Paid tiers add unlimited vessels and trips, AI risk scoring, fuel optimization, advanced weather routing, offshore-passage tools, crew collaboration, fleet dashboards, and analytics.

Launch a demo voyage — no account needed to look around — or compare plans.