From the bridge
RSSPractical maritime compliance.
Plain-English writing for commercial operators — USCG rules, Sub M, STCW, cyber, and the free tools we built along the way. No regulatory fog. No SEO filler.
Puget Sound Pilotage: Dispatch in a Busy, Multi-Port District
Puget Sound is the opposite problem from a remote inlet: not too little traffic to see, but a great deal of it, spread across many ports, threaded with ferries and a traffic separation scheme. Here's the dispatch challenge of a dense district and what helps.
Why Fleet-Tracking Software Doesn't Fit a Pilots Association
A pilots association has no fleet — it has a coverage zone and a stream of other people's ships. That single difference is why generic vessel-tracking software fails a dispatch desk, and what the right data model looks like instead.
NAIS vs. Commercial AIS: Choosing the Data Source for Pilot Dispatch
Your dispatch board is only as good as its AIS feed. Terrestrial commercial feeds, satellite AIS, and the Coast Guard's Nationwide AIS each have different coverage, latency, and cost. Here's how to choose — and why some districts only work on NAIS.
Cook Inlet Pilotage: Dispatching Some of Alaska's Hardest Water
Cook Inlet pairs some of the largest tides in North America with effectively no commercial AIS coverage — a brutal combination for a dispatch desk. Here's what makes the district so demanding and what a purpose-built board does about the tide and the data gap.
Pilot Dispatch Software: What Modern Pilots Associations Actually Need
Most pilots associations still coordinate dispatch over VHF and paper boards. Here's what a purpose-built dispatch board does differently — area AIS, ETA to the boarding point, collision alerts, and a transit log that feeds billing.
CPA and TCPA Explained: The Collision-Avoidance Math Behind Vessel Traffic
Closest Point of Approach and Time to Closest Point of Approach are the two numbers every ARPA radar and collision-alert system computes. Here's what they mean, how the vector math works, and how dispatch software uses them.