It is Friday night. The boat is on the trailer in the driveway, or the rental is booked for eight the next morning, and the ramp is on a lake you have only seen from the shore. Your phone has a weather app, a maps app and nothing that knows how deep the water is. Type "boating" into the App Store and you get a page of chart apps, fishing apps, tide apps and logbooks, most of them asking for a subscription after a week.
Our answer to new boaters is shorter than the App Store makes it look: a chart, a marine forecast, the tide or the lake level, and something that finds the ramp and the fuel dock. The rest can wait until you have a season behind you.
One chart app, learned properly
On the coast, the charts themselves cost nothing. NOAA's Office of Coast Survey canceled the last of its 1,007 paper charts in December 2024, and its electronic charts, the ENCs, are now its main product. They cover US coastal waters and the Great Lakes, they are free to download from NOAA's chart site, and updates go up every weekday evening. You will never open those files yourself: a chart app draws them, and what you pay it for is the drawing, the offline download and the extras.
Inland is a different story.
NOAA does not chart most reservoirs and inland lakes, so the depth contours on your phone there come from the app maker, state agencies or other boaters' sonar logs.
The serious apps on a phone, for US waters, come down to a short list. Navionics Boating, owned by Garmin, is where most people start: on the US App Store its US and Canada charts cost 49.99 dollars a year once the free trial ends, and it charts inland lakes as well as the coast. Aqua Map draws the official NOAA charts, updated weekly, with a US and Canada chart subscription from 14.99 dollars; its Master subscription, 24.99 a year, adds more than 90,000 Army Corps of Engineers surveys, which is what you want on the Intracoastal and in shifting inlets. C-MAP's app is a free chart viewer, with full GPS use and offline downloads behind an annual subscription of 14.99 dollars. Savvy Navvy has a free version for US boaters and a Premium plan at 99 dollars a year that plans a route around the forecast, the tides and your draft. iNavX reads NOAA's raster charts for nothing and sells charts for the rest of the world. Garmin ActiveCaptain is free and makes most sense once there is a Garmin plotter to pair it with. Wavve Boating covers many US lakes; check your own lake on its coverage map before paying anyone. BoatMap draws the official NOAA charts too, in its paid Explorer plan, and its free version puts the marinas, ramps and anchorages on the same map; more on that below.
Exploratory Glory, a travel blog with a section of lake and beach reviews, ranks the navigation apps for beginners with Wavve Boating first and Navionics second, and for a first launch on a lake that order holds up: both show depth on US lakes, and neither takes long to learn. The other three on its list, iNavX, Garmin ActiveCaptain and Boating Suite, start to pay off once there is a plotter or an AIS receiver on board, or once you plan longer trips. The one thing we would add: choose one chart app and learn it at the kitchen table, rather than installing five and opening none of them at the ramp.
Levels on the lake, tides on the coast
A lake chart's depths assume a water level, and reservoirs move. Lake Lanier in Georgia is full at 1,071 feet above sea level; on December 26, 2007, it bottomed out at 1,050.79, about 20 feet down. A hump that sits a comfortable ten feet under the hull at full pool becomes an island in a drought year. Whoever runs your lake, the Army Corps of Engineers or a utility, posts the level: check it the night before and subtract.
On the coast it is the tide. NOAA Tides & Currents publishes free predictions, and its list of prediction stations runs past 3,000, with 586 in Florida alone. Pick the station nearest your ramp rather than the nearest city, because a few miles up a creek, high water can arrive well after it does at the inlet.
The Great Lakes sit in between. NOAA calls them non-tidal, with a spring tide under 5 centimeters, about 2 inches. Wind and air pressure do the moving instead, and can set up a seiche several feet high on a four-to-seven-hour cycle that people mistake for a tide.
The forecast you read before you hitch up
Start with the free ones. The National Weather Service writes marine forecasts for coastal zones and the Great Lakes, wind and waves zone by zone. On a small inland lake, the wind and the thunderstorm risk in the forecast for the nearest town tell you most of what you need. Windy, free on the phone with a paid Premium tier, lays several forecast models over one map, and it is the app we open to compare them: when two models disagree about the afternoon wind, plan for the stronger one.
On the water, the phone is the wrong place to get it. NOAA Weather Radio broadcasts warnings and forecasts 24 hours a day from more than 1,000 transmitters, on seven frequencies between 162.400 and 162.550 MHz, and the weather button on a marine VHF picks them up where a phone shows no bars.
Pick your own wind limit before the season starts, write it on a piece of tape inside the console, and do not renegotiate it at the ramp. It depends on the boat, the lake and who is aboard, and it will go up as you get better.
Something that finds the ramp, the fuel dock and lunch
The fourth app is the one beginners forget until they are circling a cove looking for fuel. You want marinas, ramps, fuel docks and places to anchor for lunch on one map, with notes from people who were there last month: whether the ramp parking fills by nine, or whether the marina sells ethanol-free gas.
That is the part we build. BoatMap is free on iPhone, Android and in the browser, with marinas, anchorages and boat ramps on one map, reviews from other boaters, the weather forecast for whatever spot you tap and, for anchorages, a protection score that updates with the wind forecast. Official NOAA charts for US waters come with the paid Explorer plan, billed monthly or yearly; the free version is enough for finding places, and on a reservoir that NOAA does not chart you will still want a lake chart app next to it. Navionics and ActiveCaptain carry community marina notes too, so if one of them is already on your phone, start there and add BoatMap for the ramps and the anchorages.
What can wait until next season
A chartplotter, for a start.
On familiar water in daylight, a phone in a waterproof case with one chart app does the job, and a first season teaches you what you would want a plotter to do. When you get there, our dashboard installation guide prices a 9-inch unit and the wiring behind it. This is the call we are surest of: put part of the plotter money into a handheld VHF this year.
These can wait too:
- AIS and ship-tracking apps. Essential near a shipping channel, pointless on a reservoir.
- A second chart subscription. Two apps drawing the same contours slightly differently is a distraction, not a backup.
- Trip logs, social feeds and route planners. Pleasant in year two, but none of them replaces looking at the chart.
- Paid forecast upgrades. The free NWS forecast, read carefully, beats a premium model glanced at once.
If you are renting this year to find out whether you like it, the hull checks a naval engineer makes on a used sailboat are worth reading before next spring's listings, powerboat buyers included, since several of them apply to any fiberglass hull.
The basics no app teaches
The federal life jacket rule, 33 CFR 175.15, is short: one wearable Coast Guard-approved life jacket per person aboard, one throwable device on boats 16 feet or longer (canoes and kayaks excepted), and a life jacket worn by every child under 13 while the boat is under way, unless the child is below decks or in an enclosed cabin. Where a state sets its own age for children, the state rule applies.
Wearing them is the part that counts. In the Coast Guard's 2024 figures, 556 people died in recreational boating accidents, drowning was the cause in 76% of those deaths, and 87% of the people who drowned were not wearing a life jacket. Where the operator's training was known, 69% of deaths happened on boats whose operator had never taken a boating safety course.
That last figure is the cheapest one to change. The BoatUS Foundation's free online course is approved by NASBLA, takes three to five hours and is accepted for the state requirement in more than 35 states. In Florida, anyone born on or after January 1, 1988 needs a boating safety education card to run a boat of 10 horsepower or more.
A phone is not a radio. Channel 16 (156.800 MHz) is the distress and calling channel, and the Coast Guard monitors it around the clock; channel 9 is where recreational boats call each other, so that 16 stays clear. A handheld VHF clipped by the helm, switched on and set to 16, does more for you in season one than any app on this page.
The night before
The phone that goes in the boat bag:
- one chart app, with the area downloaded and the ramp found on it
- the marine forecast read, and the gusts compared with the number on the tape
- the tide at the nearest station, or today's lake level subtracted from the contours
- the ramp, the fuel dock and a lunch spot saved in a place finder
- a full battery and a charging cable, next to a charged handheld VHF
The App Store can stay closed until the boat comes out of the water in the fall.
