How to find the perfect boat mooring? Every boater obviously follows different paths. There’s the sea wolf who doesn’t need to ask, and who, through personal experience and long conversations on the dock with other sailors, already knows which tourist ports and marinas to moor at during their crossings. Then there’s the boater who, before leaving for a cruise with family or friends, plans everything in detail, arming themselves with patience to consult nautical charts, online forums and so on. And then there are those who love to improvise at least a little, and who based on the wind, the mood of the moment, the weather and so on decide from time to time where to moor, perhaps leaving space for overnight stops at anchorage. Well, especially for this last type of boater – but also for the planner mentioned above – it can certainly be useful to have an app on their smartphone that can indicate for each position the nearest and best tourist ports to moor their boat. In recent years there has been a real flourishing of sites and applications that provide this service: today we therefore want to indicate the main ones, to always find the ideal anchorage based on your needs, without spending too much time or too much energy.
The Best Apps to Find Boat Mooring from your Smartphone
Navily
It’s certainly not a new name for the most tech-savvy boaters. Navily is a decidedly innovative and very information-rich nautical guide. To date it has over 18,000 stored anchorages, as well as 12,000 ports referenced by the user community. And the strong point is certainly the latter, namely the presence of many users who post comments and photos on the different mooring possibilities. The name Navily is the contraction of “The Navigation Family”, an activity that has been active since 2004. This great guide for ports is active in about ten countries, thus giving support to those who sail in the Mediterranean between Europe, Tunisia, Morocco and Malta. Thanks to Navily it is possible to search for ideal moorings based on your needs, calculating in an easy and intuitive way the nautical distances to cover to reach the selected landing.
Using Navily is simple: just create a profile, search for the tourist port in the reference area and, once you find the ideal one, submit the request for online mooring reservation. Let’s take for example our Marina Porto Antico Tourist Port in Genoa. On Navily we can boast a score of 5 stars out of 5 – thus being the number 1 tourist port in Liguria – thanks to 41 positive user reviews. On our profile you can learn about the number of berths, the characteristics of the moorings, the draft, the reference VHF channel, the services available and the weather forecast. In short, easy and fast!
Ormeggio OnLine
Another useful tool for finding boat mooring is OrmeggioOnLine, a smaller reality compared to Navily, but still useful for those moving in Italian seas. Here you can find 94 certified ports, starting the search by region or by area. Also here it is possible to find a mooring by entering precise filters, at a geographical level, at the level of boat length and so on. Like Navily, this tool is also absolutely free, without requiring any commission. Once you have identified the ideal port, all you need to do is visit its profile, check the data present and proceed with the online quote request for mooring your boat
DockBooking
The Dock Booking app is a decidedly more recent reality compared to Navily. It was in fact launched in 2017, and allows you to book your boat berth online using a credit card. It is a decidedly intuitive and fast tool, which presents no additional costs for the user, who can thus access the list of ports and make the reservation without any commission and without surcharges. All you have to do is download the app, register and enter some key information about your boat and the reference area. You can thus have a good amount of information on available tourist ports with real-time updated data, as well as the distance to travel, the type of mooring and so on. In short, a tool that can compete with Navily
PortBooker
Here’s another international app for booking boat berths online. The mooring search service is also available on the company’s website. In total the system has about 9,000 ports worldwide, between the Mediterranean and the United States, reaching as far as China. The service is perhaps less complete than that offered by Navily and DockBooking, but can still be helpful. Here too all you need to do is enter the port name, arrival date and departure date, then specify the dimensions and type of vessel. The platform then allows you to get in touch with the selected port.
Some Apps that Have (Temporarily?) Left Us
It should be said that in recent years other apps have also been created to find mooring for your boat. Among the most interesting are for example Easy Harbor and the Sardinian Marinanow. These two solutions, however, at the time of writing this article for our News section are no longer reachable online: we will keep them under control for the future, to see if they will become active again!
How to Choose the Perfect Mooring for your Boat
As we have seen, thanks to these online sites and using these apps when away from home, finding a boat berth actually becomes very easy. Obviously it is up to the boater to deepen all the information collected, to understand if the tourist ports proposed by the apps actually offer all the necessary services: we saw a few weeks ago on these same pages what is necessary to check to book the perfect boat mooring for your boat, therefore taking into consideration the space, the seabed, the distances, the type of dock and other crucial data.
