Eight steps, most of them once. The first time takes about ten minutes; after that, filling a boat is one message.
Put your email in and Burgee sends a link. Tap it and you are in. Nothing to remember, nothing to reset at the chart table with one bar of signal. The link works on a different device from the one that asked for it, so you can request it on the laptop and open it on the phone.
Her name, her draught, how many she sleeps and how many she takes for a day. Burgee asks for doubles and singles separately, and then asks how many she really sleeps – five berths and sleeps three is the normal answer, because almost nobody wants to share a double with somebody they met at a social.
Is there ever a state of tide when she cannot get in or out? A sill, a bar, a drying berth, a bridge. If the answer is no – a pontoon in deep water, anywhere you have never had to wait – Burgee never mentions tides again and you pick dates straight from a calendar. Most berths are like this.
A year of tides for almost any UK port costs a few pounds as a PDF. Burgee needs low waters and heights, not just the times of high water – without the lows it cannot work out the shape of the tide between them. The file is read in your browser and stays on that device. Nothing is uploaded, which is also why a table you bought stays yours.
Burgee works in height, not hours. It adds the drying height of your sill to your draught and the margin you want under the keels, then finds every moment the tide is above that – which is hours on a spring, minutes on a neap, and sometimes nothing at all. Then it pairs departures with returns you could actually make, and hides the ones that leave at two in the morning. Nothing is thrown away: it tells you how many it has hidden.
Pick a date, or several, and Burgee writes the message and makes the link. You paste it into the thread you already use. One date becomes an invitation; several become a poll, so people tick what suits. There is a QR code too, for when you meet somebody at a social and want them on the list before you have their number.
A page with the date, where you are going, how many berths are left and two buttons. They tap their own name and say yes or no. No account, no app, no password – that is the whole point, and it is why people actually reply. They get a link of their own afterwards, which is where they change their mind, read the briefing, and leave a number for somebody to ring if it goes wrong.
Move the trip to another tide and the link stays the same, the replies stay, and Burgee shows you who has not seen the change yet. Call it off and everybody who said yes sees that instead, with your reason. The message that is hardest to send – I have to drop out – is one tap for them and does not need a conversation.
Burgee tells you when a tide allows a passage. It does not tell you the weather is fit, the crew is ready or the boat is sound. Published sill heights disagree with each other, a tide curve is an approximation, and a prediction is not a measurement – wind and pressure move the real height, sometimes by half a metre.
Check every number against the chart, the pilot book, local knowledge and Notices to Mariners before you commit to a tide. The gauge at the entrance beats anything on a screen. The passage is the skipper’s, and always will be.
Look in your junk folder first. The link lasts an hour, works once, and asking for another one straight away will be refused – there is a limit on how often they can be sent.
Reading a PDF is the one thing that works better on a computer. Do it once there and the tides stay in that browser. Or paste the rows in instead, which works anywhere.
Usually the table has high waters only. Burgee needs the low waters and the heights too. It will also show nothing if the season is set so she is out of the water, or if the height she needs is more than the tide ever reaches – both of which it says on the screen.
There is a Feedback board inside the app. It is read by the person who builds it, which is one person, and the version number in the footer tells him which Burgee you were looking at.