Route Planning Just Got Smarter

April 4, 2025 • 2 min read

Learn how Orca’s improved route planning helps you navigate safer and smarter.

Great planning makes your trips safer and more enjoyable. Knowing what lies ahead, anticipating complex navigational challenges, and staying ahead of weather changes can make a big difference to your day on the water.

Last year, Orca boaters created over 1 million automatic routes, with more than 96% of all saved routes generated by Orca’s automatic routing system—a testament to its quality, speed, and ease of use.

Teaching automatic routing systems to navigate like experienced boaters is challenging. It requires understanding your boat, your crew’s abilities, local conditions, and personal preferences. An automatic routing system must strike a good balance between these in a way that fits most boaters.

The Orca Routing Team continuously refines its routing system, and recent improvements have made routing smarter and safer. Here’s what’s new.

Recent improvements to routing

Faster sail route creation

Creating Sail Routes for long trips presents a big challenge because the potential routing options and weather variations are virtually limitless. Striking a good balance between exploring alternatives to find a high-quality option versus finding a route quickly is more art than science.  

Over the past months, Orca’s Sail Routes have become significantly faster via improvements to the underlying routing algorithms. These improvements allow Orca to quickly identify optimal weather conditions and deliver high-quality sailing much faster than before:

• Routes calculate on average 20% faster, and are up to 50% faster on routes over 200 nautical miles

• As of the latest updates to performance, cases where Orca times out due to long and complex routes have been nearly eliminated

Orca's faster Sail Routes now calculate dock-to-dock from Oslo, Norway to Middelburg, Netherlands in less than 60 seconds.

Improved inland Europe waterway routing

Routes covering lakes, rivers, canals, and locks in the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium have now been massively improved by the addition of detailed canal and lock data. This update significantly improves route quality and affects approximately half of all routes generated in these countries.

You can now explore routes like Rotterdam to Amsterdam via Utrecht, navigate from the Dutch coastline to inland Germany, travel from Hamburg to Berlin, or go from Potsdam to the Baltic Sea.

You can now route from Rotterdam via Utrecht and Amsterdam to De Fluezen. This was previously not possible due to poor or missing lock and canal data.

Better Sail Routes in tight areas

Sail Routes are now significantly better when navigating in areas with navigational constraints. In the past, Orca would often switch to engine in constrained environments. This has been considerably improved, and Orca can now deliver Sail Routes that thread through narrow passages – even when sailing upwind.

Top shows the updated Sail Routing that keeps sailing through a narrow channel. Bottom shows the old Sail Routing switching to engine in order to pass through the narrow passage.

Sail Routes has also been adjusted to be smarter about avoiding obstacles. Sail Routes will now tack or gybe further away from obstacles such as the shoreline, shallows, or marks when space is sufficient, making for less stressful and safer routes.

Smarter use of engine

Sail Routing will switch to going by engine if the wind speed falls below your preferred minimum windspeed or if a section of the route requires very complex maneuvering. Under certain wind conditions or when sailing near shore, sail routing engines typically switch back and forth between sailing and engine repeatedly.

Orca now avoids this repeated switching between engine and sail by factoring in the cost of setting and lowering sails.

The top image shows old Sail Routing with repeated switching between engine and sail represented by grey and blue sections. The bottom image shows the updated Sail Routing that waits with hoisting sail until the boat has fully passed the narrows.

The modern navigation experience

If you are looking for a smart navigation system that delivers a rich planning experience with deep boat integration and control, look no further. Orca lets you effortlessly plan routes and follow up by controlling your onboard autopilot to follow your planned route.

Orca Core gives you a complete chartplotter experience on all your devices.

Experience modern navigation with the Orca Core and Display. Orca is delivered with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee and free express shipping. Order yours from the Orca Store today.