About

Aviation-grade awareness, ported to the water.

For two decades, pilots have flown inside a glass cockpit: one screen that fuses terrain, weather, traffic, and route into a single picture they can read at a glance. Step onto a boat and the picture falls apart. Most marine apps still hand you a flat blue chart — a slightly tinted scan of a paper page — and call it situational awareness. BoatClaw exists to close that gap. We're building the cockpit boaters never got, so more people read the water clearly and come home safe.

What BoatClaw is

BoatClaw is an aviation-grade marine navigation app for iPhone and iPad, built by Crab Labs. It takes the layered, glance-able awareness that aviation takes for granted and brings it to the helm — one screen that fuses the bottom, the sky, the traffic, and the tide into a view you can actually use underway.

At its core is continuous, infrared-style depth shading built from public NOAA bathymetry — not flat blue, but a living picture of how the bottom rolls and shoals beneath you. On top of that sits a Hazard Advisor that flags caution and warning depths tuned to your own boat's draft, so the chart speaks in the only number that matters: clearance under your keel.

Around that foundation, BoatClaw layers the rest of what a captain has to hold in their head:

• a weather cockpit — radar, multi-day forecasts, wind, waves, lightning, and live buoys, stations, and cams;
• AIS collision awareness, so you see the traffic around you before it becomes a decision;
• tides and currents, because the depth under you is a moving target;
• draft-aware auto-routing with a real passage planner — per-leg ETA, tide, and current, a weather window, and safe harbors along the way;
• marinas with clearance math, Coast Pilot narratives, and GPS track logging;
• and a vessel ownership vault for the documents and photos that prove your boat is yours.

Day and night modes, smooth high-framerate rendering, and a quiet, dark interface that stays out of the way until you need it.

Why it matters

A flat-blue chart tells you the channel, the buoys, and not much else. It won't tell you where the bottom comes up just off-channel, which way the next squall line is tracking, whether the wave field at the inlet is going to make a slot you can run, or how today's tide quietly changes the math on a route you've taken a hundred times. The information exists — it's just scattered across a dozen websites, none of them built for a moving boat.

Groundings are among the most common ways a good day on the water goes wrong, and so many of them come down to the same thing: not enough of the picture, soon enough, in one place. BoatClaw is built to shrink that gap — to do the comparison work for you and put the bottom, the weather, and the traffic into a single layered view you can read at a glance. It won't make the ocean safe, and it won't make a decision for you. But better awareness is how risk goes down, and that's the whole point.

The captain is always responsible. Our job is to make sure the captain is never the last to know.

Where the data comes from

We build on public, authoritative sources wherever they exist — NOAA charts and bathymetry, National Weather Service forecasts, NEXRAD radar, the national network of buoys and coastal stations, public AIS, and a trusted basemap. What BoatClaw adds is the presentation: stitching those sources into one interface that respects the boater's time and turns raw feeds into a picture you can act on. We're not a data provider. We're the layer that makes the data legible at the helm.

Who's behind it

Crab Labs is a small, independent software studio. BoatClaw isn't a side project bolted onto a dozen others — it's the thing we get up to build, made for the boater who wants more than a prettier chart and a tool honest enough to earn its place on the helm.

Small studio, narrow focus, and a single thing to answer to: whether the app actually keeps people safer on the water. That's by design. We'd rather build one thing that genuinely improves the picture at the helm than ten that look good in a screenshot.

Come aboard

BoatClaw is entering its beta now, by invitation, through Apple TestFlight — ahead of a public App Store release. If you run shallow water, watch weather, or just want more than a prettier chart, we'd love to have you aboard early. You can request a TestFlight invite here.

For anything else — support, press, privacy, or just to tell us what the water taught you — reach us at team@boatclaw.com.