Boating News

The app is intended as a social platform to connect with others while out on the water, plan trips with fellow boaters, learn about popular boating spots and read reviews, and even log voyages and share them with family and friends. The app also has some navigational features so that you can plan the quickest and safest route, customized for your boat.

I wanted boaters to have the ability to find out where their friends are on the water and share experiences with friends and family. I wanted Argo to use crowdsourcing to not only get the latest hazards, weather and map issues, but also find interesting places to go and see. I also wanted Argo to offer a clean, customizable map with point-to-point navigational capability.

Jeff Foulk wanted to be able to plan a boat trip on the Chesapeake Bay the same way he plans a road trip — using an app on his phone. But no one had yet created an app that would allow boaters to easily navigate waterways and figure out the best spots to visit. So Foulk created his own app. Argo launched in early September and already has nearly 200 boaters signed up.

Foulk, CEO of Harford County, Maryland-based defense contracting company SURVICE Engineering and founder of Argo Navigation, has been boating on the Bay in a series of Grady-Whites over the past 40 years. He realized the best hidden anchorages and dockside restaurants come by word of mouth, and was inspired to create an app that allows boaters to share insider knowledge with each other.

One key use [of Argo] was when we were moving a 37-foot Sea Ray from Middle River to the Gunpowder, which needed to be at the bridge at low tide. It was a cold rainy Saturday morning and we headed out around 7:30 a.m. only to find that the GPS was not functioning. Then the wipers went out. Thankfully we had the Argo app. I was at the helm, the boat owner held the app and kept us within our boundaries…

“I get asked all the time about where to go and how to get there,” said Weatherstein, a marine master technician at All Star Marine in Essex, Md. “I tell them to follow such-and-such a creek and they say, woah, we’re new to boating. We don’t know where that creek is. How cool is it for them to punch it into an app and it takes them there?” Think of it as having a first mate in your pocket.

The pandemic made for an uncertain start to boating season, but with restrictions gradually easing up (and canceled land-based events leaving us with extra free time), plenty of folks are back on the water. A nautical navigation app made just for the Chesapeake launched last October and is gaining traction during the return to boating.

Argo is now available for socially minded mariners looking for an app that allows you to connect with other boaters, plan out your voyage, and navigate to the next destination. […] The really unique feature, however, is the ability to tap into community reviews and gain some insight into local beaches, marinas, waterfront restaurants, and other places and ports you might visit. The best part? The price. Free.

The upper Chesapeake Bay has so much to offer”, says Don Elwell. “We’ve explored all the small inlets from Rock Hall to the C&D Canal — Fairlee Creek, Worton Creek, Still Pond, Sassafras River, Bohemia River. We love those inlets and will often go up just gunkholing for a week or so. And this year we’re doing it with Argo.

From navigation to finding friends at the sandbar or checking into customs, there’s an app for that. For boaters who want to find out where all the cool kids are hanging out on the water, the KnowWake and Argo apps combine navigation with social networking. They are like the on-land navigating app Waze in that they show the locations of the other members of the app.