Passage planning done effortlessly.
The best sailing days are the ones where you leave the dock prepared. You already know how the day is likely to unfold — how the weather will change when the current turns in your favour, and whether a small delay will mean a late arrival or a tougher journey in bad weather.
Good planning makes for a better day on the sea, especially for cruising sailors who travel longer distances. That is exactly the kind of boating Orca is built for.
Automatic routing
The foundation of passage planning in Orca is automatic routing. Orca's automatic routing combines charts, weather forecasts, tides, and currents to find the best path to your destination. Select a destination from the chart or via search, and Orca calculates a route that accounts for the conditions ahead.
For sailors, Orca delivers Sail Routes, which use your boat's polar diagram alongside the weather forecast to find the fastest sailing path to your destination.
Should you want full control of a route, say you need to navigate a particularly complex harbour approach, you can always fall back to manual routes, which let you add waypoints by hand.
Getting the most out of routing in Orca
Orca comes with great defaults, but different boat types, regions, and conditions call for different routing practices.
You can control all your route preferences via Main Menu > My Boat > Routing Settings, so if you want to get the most out of Orca's routing, you should have a look and adjust them to your own preferences. Here are a few elements to review:
Depth Limit
The routing engine will attempt to avoid areas shallower than the depth limit you set. In cases where there is no navigable route without entering shallow waters, Orca will still find a way to your destination, but will display the shallow section in red as a warning.
A general recommendation is to set the Depth Limit slightly deeper than your boat's draft.
Distance to shore
Some boaters may be fine cutting close to shore, but others prefer to keep their distance. You can adjust your preference, and Orca will adjust to your preferences where there is sufficient space to shore.
The illustration below shows the same route with zero and 500-meter shoreline distance. The route to the right, which has the largest shoreline distance, takes a different path that is longer, but avoids narrow passages.
Polar Diagram
For sailboat owners, setting your polar diagram makes routing a lot more accurate. A Polar Diagram describes how quickly your boat can travel at different wind speeds and angles. Sail Routes in Orca uses this to calculate how fast you will actually move along a route in the forecasted conditions.
You can set this up via Main Menu > My Boat > Polar Performance.
When you select Sail Routes, Orca uses your polar diagram alongside the weather forecast to find the fastest sailing path to your destination, accounting for tacks, gybes, and the conditions you will encounter along the way.
A complete navigation system
A unique part of Orca is that Orca's routing experience runs on your phone, tablet, laptop, and the Orca Display. Saved routes also synchronize between your devices automatically, so you can plan at home on your laptop and pick up the route in your boat on your Orca Display 2.
Orca Display 2 makes planning and navigation fun and effortless.
If you are looking for a combination of a great planning experience and marine-grade robustness, you should have a look at the Orca Display. It handles sunshine effortlessly with its ultrabright screen, hot summers, and cold winters, and its touchscreen is designed for use in rain and sea spray. All Orca products are delivered with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee and free express shipping.
Free express shipping and 30-day satisfaction guarantee included.
Customer Reviews
Innovative System, But Crucial Gaps Keep Me Paying for Navionics
GreeceSailboatOver 55 feet (16.5 meters)Short cruising trips13 connected devicesAs a modern sailor managing a 17-meter yacht with a 3-meter draft, I am highly appreciative of Orca’s innovative approach, sleek interface, and modern features. It is a fantastic, forward-thinking system, and I gladly pay the €140 annual subscription just to support the development of such a promising product. However, despite having the full Orca setup on board, I am still forced to pay for and run a parallel Navionics subscription because Orca currently lacks a few critical navigational functionalities. There are two major areas where Orca falls short for my blue-water cruising needs: 1. Inaccurate Routing Around Fixed Obstacles (Bridges) The autorouting engine needs to become smarter regarding overhead clearance and openable structures. On a recent trip, Orca routed me straight through a bridge. While the bridge was visible on the map, the system completely ignored the fact that the bridge cannot be opened for a vessel of my mast height. I ended up stuck right in front of it, forced to backtrack and sail all the way around an island—adding an frustrating two hours of extra travel time to my journey. 2. Missing High-Resolution Depth Contours for Anchoring With a 3-meter draft, anchoring safely is a precise science. I always aim to anchor as shallow and close to the shore as possible to get maximum protection, while strictly avoiding running my keel aground. To do this safely, I absolutely depend on detailed, high-resolution depth contours. Right now, Orca’s depth data lacks the fidelity required for tight, shallow anchorages, forcing me to switch back to Navionics to cross-reference depths before dropping the hook. Conclusion Orca is an incredibly well-designed, innovative product that represents the future of marine navigation. I love the hardware and the overall ecosystem, which is why I remain a loyal subscriber. But until Orca implements reliable bridge clearance routing and high-resolution depth contours, it cannot be my sole primary system. I truly hope the development team addresses these gaps soon so I can finally drop my legacy subscriptions and rely 100% on Orca.
Show Full ReviewSweet product - many features in a box.
Baltic Sea +2 moreSailboat25-35 feet (7.5-10.5 meters)Short cruising trips10 connected devicesThe Core2 together with the app offers a lot of flexibility. Instead of or replacing a regular chart plotter, It discovered all of my mixed bunch of instruments on NMEA2K and is very easy to use. It will even talk to my autopilot.
Show Full ReviewDisplay 2
Orca Display
Germany +1 moreSailboat35-45 feet (10.5-13.5 meters)Long trips13 connected devicesHallo Orca Team, zwei Sachen, ich hatte mit eurem ki Assistenten korrespondiert und gefragt ob das Display eine Vesa Aufnahme hat. Dies wurde bejaht. Leider ist dem nicht so. Nach erneutem nachfragen sagte eurer ki Assistent dass eine Vesa Aufnahme nur mit einem Mount vorhanden ist. Da ich aber bereits einen Ram Mount habe, brauche ich die meisten Teile eures Mounts nicht. Ergo viel Geld für nichts. Zweitens, warum soll viele Google Apps? Ja, es ist ein Android System aber man kann den ganzen überflüssigen Google Mist, außer den Pay Store, nicht einmal entfernen. Denn was geht es Google an, wo ich segel, was ich nutze, was ich mache? Aber es gibt auch Lob. Euer Orca System ist gut. Ich nutze es als Redundanz zu OpenCPN auf einem Raspberry Pi 5 mit Bookworm. Danke und weiterhin viel Erfolg.
Show Full ReviewThe Tesla of chart plotters.
Denmark +3 moreSailboat35-45 feet (10.5-13.5 meters)Living aboard +2 more10 connected devicesMore stable than I expected and new features every year without buying new devices. Initially considered upgrading my old Raymarine plotter to Axiom, but got frustrated paying around 2000EUR for a product that was essentially 5 years old. Decided to try Orca after trying the free app for a few weeks, and the Core 2 did not cost more than I was willing to loose if It did not live up to expectations. on third season with Orca now, and have not looked back. Using it with iPad Pro (1000 nits = quite usable in sunlight) & Iphone, as the Display 2 is simply too old to justify its price.
Show Full ReviewOrca review
Baltic Sea +3 moreSailboat35-45 feet (10.5-13.5 meters)Long trips +1 more12 connected devicesSuperfornøyd med Orca
Show Full Review