BoatKit has advanced routing features that use your vessel’s listed dimensions as a baseline, then let you decide how much additional safety room to require for depth and width concerns along a route. BoatKit finds routes that fully meet those comfort settings. When a significantly shorter route passes through a narrow or shallow area that still fits the vessel itself but falls outside the configured safety margins, BoatKit can present it alongside the safer option for you to examine and decide whether the tradeoff is acceptable.
An adjustable open-water preference also gives otherwise-valid segments near shore or charted hazards a modest extra cost. That cost is strongest near the required lateral clearance and tapers as the available room grows, rather than changing at one fixed offshore distance. The default favors a slightly longer route when it creates substantially more room, while still allowing a tight passage when the open-water detour would be large. Set it to 0% to prefer the shortest route that meets the required depth and width margins.
Once underway, the accepted route supplies progress, remaining distance, time to destination, and next guidance to charts and custom driving views.
Route planning is an aid built from the available chart data and configured vessel dimensions. Every proposal still needs review against official charts, current notices, weather and tides, local knowledge, and the judgment of the person responsible for navigation.
Routing data updates follow the dataset version selected by the BoatKit release. Separately tested datasets can evolve while existing installations continue receiving compatible builds of their current data.