The passage you'd actually sail.
Waka is a navigation and passage-planning app for cruising sailors, built for Apple platforms by people who cruise. It was born at a nav station in the Marlborough Sounds, and every design decision in it has been tested where it matters — underway.
A different planning philosophy
Most weather-routing software optimises aggressively: it will happily send a short-handed cruising boat far off the direct line to chase a forecast advantage that may not survive the next model run. Waka is built on the opposite conviction. It plans conservatively, prefers robust routes over fragile optima, and when the honest answer is "there is no good departure window this week" — it says so, rather than dressing up a marginal one.
The same honesty runs through the whole app. Forecast data is sampled at the resolution the weather model actually provides, not interpolated into false confidence. Comfort predictions are given as meaningful bands, not decimal points. If the data can't support a claim, Waka doesn't make it.
What it does
Passage planning
Plans built on your real boat
You describe how your boat actually sails — a handful of honest speed points, your motoring speed, when you'd motor-sail — and Waka plans with a three-regime model (sailing, motor-sailing, motoring) that reflects how cruisers really make passages. A timeline scrubber walks the passage hour by hour with the forecast evolving around you.
Departure planning
Windows ranked like a cruiser
Compare departure times across the days ahead, ranked by what matters to a cruising crew: staying inside your wind and sea-state limits first, comfort and passage time after that.
Tides & streams
Tidal gates, done properly
For waters where timing is everything — Cook Strait, Tory Channel, French Pass — Waka couples authoritative tidal stream data directly into the passage timeline, so the plan respects the gate, not the other way round.
Live instruments & AIS
Your boat's data, everywhere
NMEA 0183 and Signal K integration brings wind, speed, depth, heading, and AIS targets to the iPad at the nav station, the iPhone in the cockpit, and the Apple TV in the saloon — merged into a single honest picture, with closest-point-of-approach calculations for anything that matters.
Sea state & comfort
Measured, not assumed
Using the iPad's own motion sensors, Waka measures how the boat is actually moving and folds real comfort data into passage planning — because the difference between a good passage and a bad one is usually not speed.
Offline-first
Built for where there's no signal
Everything essential works with no connection. Forecasts and planning data are cached aboard; the internet is a convenience, never a dependency.
Platforms
Waka is being built natively for iPad (the primary nav-station experience), iPhone, and Apple TV (a glanceable saloon display fed directly from your instruments).
Status: Waka is in active development and testing aboard in New Zealand. It will come to the App Store when it's ready — and beta places via TestFlight will be offered before that. If you'd like to hear when, email ben@apexlabs.co.nz with the subject "Waka".