How far is it to the edge of your cover?

1 · Your cruising area

The areas are nested: the larger one includes the smaller ones. Anyone covered for the Mediterranean is covered on the home waters as well.

A different policy that states degrees? Enter them here and the finding uses that rectangle instead. North and east positive, south and west negative.

What this page is not

It replaces neither navigation nor a look at the contract. With one of the areas above, the page uses the same limits as the map below, drawn from the wording of our cruising areas including the excluded coasts. With your own degrees it uses a rectangle. It knows nothing about restricted zones or seasonal limits. What governs is always the text of your policy, not this display.

Position and degrees stay in your browser, they are neither stored nor sent. If you want to extend the boundary, do it before you cast off: under way an extension is difficult and sometimes no longer possible at all.

Reading the finding

How the boundary check calculates, and where it stops

With one of the areas above, the tool asks the map below and measures, in 24 directions, how far you can sail before reaching water outside the area or an excluded coast. With degrees entered by hand, it treats the cruising area as a rectangle drawn from its limits: a north limit, a south limit, a west limit and an east limit, each given in decimal degrees. Your position is compared with each of these lines, and the finding names the nearest edge together with the distance to it. Inside the rectangle that distance is the sea room you still have; outside it, the distance tells you how far you are beyond the line. The result is only as good as the values you type in, so take them from the schedule of your policy rather than from memory or from the name of a preset on this page.

Distance along a meridian and distance along a parallel behave differently. A degree of latitude has the same length everywhere, while a degree of longitude shrinks towards the poles. The check accounts for this, which is why the reported distance to an eastern or western limit changes with your latitude even though the degree value in the contract stays the same. The sign matters as much as the value: west and south are entered as negative. A missing minus sign shifts a boundary to the other side of the globe, and the finding then looks absurd rather than slightly off.

Typical mistakes are easy to avoid once named. The presets above are examples of how cruising ranges are commonly drawn, not a copy of your contract; any insurer may draw the lines differently or attach further conditions. Many plotters show degrees and minutes, whereas this page expects decimal degrees, so convert the minutes first instead of typing them behind a decimal point. And a comfortable distance to the edge says nothing about excluded coastal strips, restricted waters or seasonal rules, because the rectangle knows none of them.

Before you rely on the number, read the wording of your policy on the points the tool cannot see: whether the range is defined by degrees at all or by named waters, whether there are time restrictions such as a hurricane season or winter months, and what happens once you cross the line, for example a duty to notify or a lapse of cover. Wherever the wording and the rectangle differ, the wording wins.