Sailing with Orca

October 27, 2025 • 4 min read

José María Serra Cabrera from Nautica y Yates shares his hands on experience after a month of sailing with Orca.

This article, the second in a two-part series, was originally written by Jose Maria Serra Cabrera in Spanish and in Nautica y Yates Publication 81. The translation and following publication have been approved by the original author.

In the previous installment, I described Orca’s features and functions. This time, I’ll share what it was like to cruise for more than a month around the Balearic Islands using Orca as my primary navigation system. I relied on three components: the Orca Display 2 with Orca’s wireless charging mount, and the Orca Core.

First impressions

Before taking Orca aboard, I assumed it was simply a charting app like Navionics or C-MAP. In practice, Orca is a broader and more integrated navigation platform. Yes, it includes its own charts, but its real strength is how it brings those charts together with the boat’s electronics and sensors, collecting the data and presenting it clearly on the Display.

After more than 30 days underway, I can say Orca is much more than a chartplotter app. If you look at it only as a charting program, you’ll miss the advantages that come from its tight integration with the rest of the onboard electronics.

Orca Charging Mount

When you use any traditional tablet at the helm, you always have to balance battery usage while keeping the charging cable out of harm’s way. Apps that need continuous, high-accuracy GPS are power-hungry, and if your 12-volt charger can’t keep up, the battery can actually drop during use. This is something I’ve experienced with both iPad and Android tablets. On long passages, I’ve even had to shut my tablet down to recover some charge before beginning my port entrance.

Orca’s wireless charger solves that. Besides the convenience of cable-free charging, it has enough output to keep the Orca Display charged at 100%, so you can forget about USB adapters and power cables that clutter the helm.

Orca Display 2 and the Orca Charging Mount. Photo: José María Serra Cabrera.

Another genuinely useful touch is how easy it is to undock the tablet. Instead of unplugging a cable and loosening a mount, you just pull the top tab, and the tablet lifts free – perfect for checking details, editing routes, or any other task in your hands. When you’re done, drop it back into the mount, and it resumes charging. For me, that alone is a win for practicality.

Orca Core

The Orca Core is the brain of the system. It is a small device that connects to the boat’s NMEA 2000 backbone, listens to every instrument on the network, and streams that data wirelessly to the Display 2 and phone or tablet so you can make customized instrument panels.

In my case, the installation was simple. I mounted the Core and plugged it into the NMEA 2000 network – nothing else required. From that moment, it began collecting network data and making it available to the Display.

The Orca Core. Photo: José María Serra Cabrera.

If you don’t have NMEA 2000 onboard, the Core can still be powered at 12V and used; in that configuration, it won’t ingest data from your existing electronics, but the rest of Orca still works.

Once connected, the tablet discovers the Core and prompts you to perform an initial calibration, just like a new compass or autopilot. The process is straightforward: make a slow 360° turn. After calibrating the compass, I cross-checked it against the binnacle compass and found it accurate.

You can use the Orca Display 2 by itself; it has its own GPS and charts. You can even install other apps like Navionics, C-MAP, or any navigation software available from Google Play. It is, after all, an Android tablet. But the Core is what differentiates Orca from typical navigation setups. If you use it only for charting, I’d say Navionics still has an edge today in chart detail.

Being able to install other apps is genuinely practical. Alongside Orca, I added several weather apps, an anchor-drag alarm, and other tools. On some legs, I ran Navionics on the Display 2 to compare chart presentation, swapping between apps seamlessly.

Navigation, routes, and tracking

Orca’s basic navigation workflow will feel familiar. You can build routes manually by placing waypoints on the chart, or automatically by searching for destinations from its database. After you create a route, you can schedule it for departure; as soon as you cast off, you’re navigating.

Charts and instruments. Photo: José María Serra Cabrera.

One helpful feature: if you stray from the planned track, Orca continuously recomputes the leg to your active waypoint and updates the “line to steer” in real time. You can choose heading-up or north-up chart presentation with a single toggle.

Be sure to download charts ahead of time, and then you can plan or modify routes offline. Your vessel’s track is recorded in the Core and can be reviewed later in the Logbook.

Instruments

One of the features I used most was the configurable instruments page. You can create a dedicated screen with data from all the sensors on your network and tailor it for different situations, like underway navigation, at anchor, etc.

Instruments for anchorage. Photo: José María Serra Cabrera.

For example, I built an “at anchor” page with large tiles showing depth from the transducer, time, house battery state, pitch, heel, heading (to monitor swing), and position. At a glance, on a single screen, I had everything I needed to keep an anchor watch.

Orca is a modern, integrated experience. In principle, you could replace multiple legacy displays and consolidate everything into one large screen, provided you have the appropriate sensors (wind, depth, batteries, engine, and so on) feeding the system. 

Tablet navigation in the sunset. Photo: José María Serra Cabrera.

That said, prudence suggests carrying a backup: a second tablet running charting software – Orca’s own app or another – just in case. Orca’s navigation app is available for both iOS and Android, so even a smartphone makes a viable fallback.

Final thoughts

Orca strikes me as an innovative, contemporary product that breathes new life into existing onboard electronics and moves the whole experience forward. Its design clearly emphasizes user experience and user-friendly operation – how it feels to interact with the system, and how easy it is to use day to day.

—

José María Serra Cabrera

Yachtmaster

B.Sc. in Computer Science

CEO, DEINFO Servicios Informáticos