Passage planning for small boats · Beta, autumn ’26
Your passage,
thought through.
Tell Halyard where you want to be and who is aboard. It reads the tides, the forecast and the notices to mariners, then hands you a one-page brief, and while it works it tells you exactly what it is doing. Not how far along. What.
- listening
- searching
- solving
- shaping
- composing
- working
Passage 0412
Falmouth Île d’Ouessant
Thu 03 Oct
HW Dover −2
listening
Listening to your brief…
“Leaving Falmouth Thursday, two aboard, want Ouessant before dark.”
- Listening to your brief
- Reading tides and forecasts
- Weighing departure windows
- Drawing the route
- Writing your passage brief
01 · Six honest states
One orb per kind of work, never a guess.
Every activity in Halyard maps to exactly one state. When we are not sure which, we show working, because a truthful generic signal beats an interesting wrong one.
listening
Voice brief
Only while the microphone is open. The orb leaves the moment you stop talking.
Listening on deck…
searching
Tides & weather
Retrieval: tidal atlases, forecasts, notices to mariners, your own logbook.
Searching tide tables…
solving
Window planning
Reasoning over gates, daylight and crew fatigue. Never a percentage.
Weighing nine windows…
shaping
Route chart
A formed output is taking shape: waypoints, legs and bail-out lines.
Drawing the route…
composing
Passage brief
Text generation: pilotage notes, watch plan, the turn-back list.
Writing the brief…
working
Syncing the boat
Generic multi-step work, when no more precise state is true.
Updating the plotter…
02 · The chartroom
Same orb, printed on paper.
The chartroom view is light, for reading below decks at noon. Nothing is reconfigured: every orb is set to auto and picks up the surface it sits on, so the dots turn to ink here and back to light on the night console.
Wind’s backing earlier than forecast. Can we still make the Four before the tide turns?
solving
Re-running the 14:00 window against the new wind…
03 · House rules
What the orb is not allowed to do.
- i
Pretend to know how long.
The orb is indeterminate. Tides don’t care about progress bars, and neither does the forecast model.
- ii
Outstay the work.
When the brief is ready, or the request fails, the orb is gone and the answer or the retry is in its place.
- iii
Speak twice.
Status text is announced once, politely. The orb itself is hidden from screen readers when the words already say it.
- iv
Move when you’ve asked it not to.
With reduced motion on, each state settles to a single still frame that still tells you what kind of work is happening.