Waterfront: Nav App Goes Viral

Check out the newest boating navigation and social networking app made for boaters by boaters.

When Arabic geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi put the Tabula Rogeriana, “The book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands,” into the hands of King Roger II of Sicily, back in 1154, it was a map ahead of the curve. His work accomplished something that no other cartographer yet had. Simply by looking over the shoulders of his classmates and utilizing the accounts of several travelers and merchants of the time, he put together something much more accurate than he could have just by surveying alone. This same principle is what is making one man’s app famous in the boating world.

The Argo Navigation App or Argo App for short, actually became famous after its creator Jeff Foulk spent hours standing around at a boat show, holding promotional pamphlets out to disinterested passersby. Foulk’s daughter, Megan filmed the sad struggle and exploited the footage of his mass rejections on TikTok to the tune of a tearful piano medley, with a caption pleading viewers to give the app a chance because her dad worked so hard on it. Hours later, empathy erupted. Dozens of interviews and a few hundred thousand social follows later, the Argo App has been abuzz.

The Argo App provides users with safe and accurate course plotting, a social network feature to connect with other local or faraway boaters, and a method of sharing tips and reporting hazards for the community. Most everything about this app utilizes the same method to success as many other recent innovations—crowdsourcing.

Foulk, a family man and defense industry specialist who spends his time boating on the waters of Chesapeake Bay, said he realized a simple but nearly universal truth when it comes to operating a vessel in today’s world—most all boats have some sort of chart plotting capability and are already inherently taking their own depth soundings as they’re plying the waters. When this information is collectively harvested, there’s a benefit to the community.

“When I started Argo Navigation, I felt that a company could really focus on crowdsourcing in a lot of different ways,” Foulk said. “And by crowdsourcing, I mean taking advantage of boaters’ knowledge or data that they’re collecting to benefit the community, and that could be in terms of dropping pins used to identify hazards or providing reviews of good anchorages and things like that.”

Starting from a grant for a phase-one study he received from NOAA about ten years ago, Foulk and his defense company began to experiment with the accuracy of crowdsourced bathymetry. Armed with NMEA0183 chart plotters, Foulk’s team of 25 boats combed through Baltimore Harbor, various inlets and harbors along the Jersey Coast, Chesapeake Bay, and up and down the ICW, gathering and regathering depth data on the waters.

“We literally just ran around the Bush River to show how we could develop and bring in crowdsourced data and how accurately it compared with NOAA and then areas where it differed from NOAA (so you could see, for example, differences in the seafloor disturbed by bottom trawling),” Foulk said. “But it was after that we probably sunk another half million dollars into the effort from my defense contracting company because we thought it was such a good idea and continued to pursue NOAA, thinking that they would eventually want to provide us the phase two [grant] but it never happened.”

According to Foulk, NOAA didn’t deem the technique that his team was using as accurate enough. Foulk will be the first to admit that while 25 individual chart plotting systems might be accurate in some places, due to storms, changing tides and many other factors, they would not be as accurate as they might if the team had 500 units out on the water with each going over the same routes.

But Foulk’s system is no shot in the dark, either. His company just received a Maryland Industrial Partnership award and is working very closely with Salisbury University Professor of Geography and Geosciences Dr. Arthur Lembo. Utilizing this partnership, the Argo Navigation team will continue to chart various lakes on the East Coast with Dr. Lembo assisting in the sifting of accurate data from the inaccurate.

“That’s the beauty of crowdsourcing, I think the more data you have—the more people running over the same spot—allows you to generate through statistics much more accurate data,” Foulk said.

Listen to our full interview in the player below:

So, what does the future of crowdsourced bathymetry and the Argo App look like? Soon at least 500 users will be able to purchase a unit to attach to their NMEA2000 chart plotters. Utilizing Bluetooth technology, the unit, which starts automatically as you turn on your MFD, will sync to your phone app. It will gather various data points from your chart plotting system and upload it to the Argo App cloud as crowd sourced data for the rest of the user community. It will also store your on-app captain’s logs, all just shy of real-time. Even if your device doesn’t have cellular service out on the water needed for feed updates, upon connecting to WiFi, all collected data from your run will be instantly uploaded.

I know what you’re thinking—crowdsourcing sounds great and you’d love to help, but why go out of your way to buy a device for this? Solely out of the goodness of your heart and because money is no object when it comes to safety on the water? If that’s your answer, perhaps Foulk should buy you dinner. But for everyone else, he plans on adding incentives (think gift cards and purchase points) to users who venture into and share data from non-Argo App charted waters. We can all probably agree that creating a safer environment for boaters to share the water is in itself the biggest reward we could ask for.

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This article originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/column/argo-navigation-app-review