What to Test First When You Try Wavve Boating’s Charts Customized to Your Draft

If you are starting a free trial of Wavve Boating, test the draft setting first, because the red shading, the shallow-water alerts, Dynamic Depths and every AutoRoute Mode all read from the draft you enter.

You enter it with your vessel information on the Me Tab. From that point the map is customized to your boat, and red shading marks the areas that are potentially shallow for your hull. The map also follows your personal preferences, including custom depth contour colors and an adjustable sounding size, so set those before you judge how it reads. Two boats on the same bay will see different water shaded, since a flats skiff and a sailboat do not share a draft. That idea is where Wavve began. Adam Allore grew up boating on the St. Lawrence River near Kingston, Ontario, and built a map that simply highlighted water too shallow for his own boat’s three-foot draft.

With the draft set, take the app onto a stretch you have run many times. You already know where the bars rise and where the flats give way to the channel, so you can hold the red shading up against that knowledge and judge it for yourself. If you go out in the middle of a sunny day, you can also check how readable the map is, since Wavve designs it to make deep and shallow water easy to tell apart at a glance and to stay clear in bright sunlight.

Next, watch for the shallow-water alerts on the same run. They adjust to the draft you entered, so see how they line up with the places you would steer around in that boat. If you have an Apple Watch paired with your iPhone, you will also feel a haptic warning on your wrist when you approach shallow water.

Then look at Dynamic Depths. It combines the charted depth with your draft and with local water-level or tide information where that data is available. On tidal water the app also shows each day’s high and low, and if no water-level station is close by, you can adjust the level by hand. Compare the shading early and late on a falling tide, or on a reservoir before and after the level drops, and you will see whether it moves with the water.

After that, plan a route between two places you know well. AutoRouting considers obstacles, channels and water depths when it builds a course, and every AutoRoute Mode accounts for your draft, whether you pick Prefer Channels, Most Direct or Balanced. Run it next to the line you would normally take and see where the two differ.

Keep two limits in mind while you test. Dynamic Depths works from charted data, so it is not sonar or a depth sounder, and it does not tell you the exact depth under the boat at a given moment. Chart and depth detail also vary by body of water and by data source.