Boating safety courses are great at teaching you what a "No Wake" sign looks like. They are significantly less helpful when you are staring at a 20-knot crosswind and a $100,000 yacht is drifting toward your bow in a crowded slip.
Enter Harbor.
We are currently in active development on a new kind of boating application. Harbor isn't just a guide; it's a simulator built on a custom physics engine specifically tuned for small-to-mid-sized vessels.
The Problem with "Learning by Doing"
In boating, mistakes are expensive. A "minor" docking error can result in thousands of dollars in fiberglass repair or, worse, safety risks to your crew. Most boaters learn these lessons through trial, error, and high-stress situations.
"The water doesn't grade on a curve. A miscalculation in current doesn't result in a B-minus — it results in a bent prop or a cracked hull."
Traditional boating courses are excellent at covering regulations, right-of-way, and navigation aids. But they don't — and can't — teach you the feel of a boat. How it drifts after you cut the throttle. How a gust of wind catches the freeboard. How prop walk kicks the stern sideways in reverse. These are kinetic lessons, and until now, they've required real water and real consequences.
The Harbor Solution
We've spent the last few months codifying the physics of the water:
- Prop Walk: That annoying (but predictable) sideways kick in reverse. We model it as a torque vector applied at the stern, scaled by RPM and hull resistance.
- Ferry Angling: How to aim upstream so the current carries you perfectly into your slip. The sim calculates drift vectors in real-time and visualizes the optimal approach angle.
- Spring Lines: Using mechanical levers to pivot a boat off a wind-on dock. We simulate cleat points, line tension, and the resulting pivot motion.
Harbor takes these technical concepts and puts them into a "game" format. You'll face 9 distinct scenarios — ranging from reading NOAA forecasts during a "Weather Window" to managing a weight-distribution sandbox to prevent capsizing.
What's Under the Hood?
Built with Flutter and Flame, Harbor is designed for ultra-smooth 60fps performance on mobile. We chose Flame's game loop architecture because boating physics demand frame-precise updates — drag coefficients, momentum decay, and wind gust modeling all need to tick at consistent intervals.
We're prioritizing "feel" — the way a boat drifts after you cut the throttle, or how a gust of wind catches the freeboard — so that when you get behind the real wheel, the muscle memory is already there. The visual style is clean, top-down 2D navigation with technical overlays: current arrows, wind vectors, and collision indicators that teach you to read the water like a chart.
The Scenarios
Harbor's curriculum is organized into three chapters, each containing three scenarios:
- Before You Go: The Weather Window (NOAA forecast decision trees), the Float Plan, and the Stability Sandbox (center-of-gravity loading simulation).
- At the Ramp: The Busy Ramp (mastering the ferry angle in cross-currents), trailer backing, and launch sequencing.
- Leaving the Dock: Wind-On Docking (spring-line techniques), prop-walk maneuvering, and channel navigation in traffic.
Stay Tuned
We're currently polishing the first three chapters: Before You Go, At the Ramp, and Leaving the Dock.
The water doesn't care if it's your first day or your fiftieth. Harbor helps you make sure it's a good one.
Follow along for more updates as we approach our first Beta window.